Friedrich,

Just a quick update. Wish I could tell you that your spammers are gone, but ...

I did buy and download vBulletin, put up a new web site, installed vB, and had it running in less than an afternoon. Their documention is superb, which I suppose is mainly where the money goes.

In the meantime, I managed to get the speed issue resolved with my existing phpBB 2.0.6 forum. For the time being, at least. That's a good thing, because as easy as it is to start a new forum, getting your existing mySql database transferred and converted is more cumbersome than I have time for. Trying to do it with a restore (an sql text dump) is a no-go. You need to download the entire mySql database. Good luck getting the ISP's approval and help with that. Even if you do everything right (and there's a lot to do right), the forum software providers warn you there's no assurance of success. Terrific!

So here is where I stand: I now have a vBulletin 3.6.9 forum that I won't be using for a while. In fact, I'll probably uninstall it when 3.7.0 goes Gold and then install that. While I was at it, I also installed a free phpBB 3 forum with BlueHost, the same ISP who is hosting my vB forum, just to get a side-by-side comparison. No regrets buying vB, mind you. In light of the time and effort required to convert and transfer forums, $160 is chump change. This time, I'll be extremely selective who I go to bed with.

Meanwhile, I'll keep running my phpBB 2.0.6 forum. That ISP has acknowledged they've had problems and promises to increase mySql capacity. We'll see.

My biggest beef is that none of the forum software providers, at least to my knowledge, offer any means of converting the highly valuable and irreplaceable contents of a commercial forum into some sort of hard copy, be it a .CHM Help file or an Acrobat .pdf. I've had to spend nearly two days manually copying and pasting my forum into a Help & Manual project. It will probably take me another week or more to format that project, but at least the contents of the Morning Flight Forum will finally no longer be at the mercy of an ISP.

There are days when we don't know whether we're coming or going. Other days, it just doesn't matter. To quote from W.C. Field's tombstone: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia!" This has been one of those weeks.

Hal Heindel
http://www.printshopmakeover.com