Synthetic Truth

---

ETA: Okay, I'm starting the activity check now!  Since all that's required is having logged in over the last month and/or posted during the last two months, I'm only going to give a few days for this.  I'll be sending an email out, as well.

Some of our long-time members don't have email addresses associated with their accounts, which is the only problem I can anticipate in moving to IPB since from what I hear each account requires a unique email address.  With that in mind, especially if you transferred from Stories, please check to make sure you have an email address with your account!

---

So I've been distracted recently for multiple reasons, but here's a big one:

Kat and I have been discussing the possibility of my purchasing the license for Invision Power Board.  SMF is free and it's nice, but it has its own annoyances, and at the end of the day I guess you get what you pay for.  IPB would be more familiar to those of you who've spent a lot of time on InvisionFree (and the old Stories site, of course), and it would open up a lot more functionality.  Sites like Tallygarunga and RPers Anonymous run on IPB 3.

We're doing a slight move either way.  I've found less expensive hosting that has great reviews and the same or better features as those we have here.  And if we do choose to move board systems as well, it will be a much smoother transition than the original one from Stories since I have control of the database this time.  You might remember that the old conversion made new passwords for everyone and didn't transfer emails over, but it wouldn't be like that this time.  It promises to be a pretty seamless transition; you'd simply login on the new board like normal.  (In the end it might even be more seamless than transferring back over to SMF since I'd have to remember how to install all our mods and themes again...)

Invision Power has a lot of extra features that are pretty amazing, like the Blog and Chat.  To start with I'd only be going with the normal board and the basic free chat plan (maximum of 5 users at a time, just to try it out).  I would probably put up an entirely voluntary donations button for bringing in extra features like the Blog and for maintaining current ones.  When I can afford it I'll get upgrades myself; anyone who chose to donate would just be helping it come around faster.

So please, post any opinions, positive or negative, here.

The new hosting package will be under a slightly altered domain (synthetictruth.net with no hyphen) but I'll look into redirecting our current domain there too until it runs out.  I'm not sure how much it would cost to make it point to the new host.

This move won't happen (at least not fully) until the current hosting package runs out at the beginning of August.  Before then I would go through another activity check to purge inactive members.  Anyone who hasn't logged in for over a month and/or hasn't posted for more than two months would be removed so as to tidy up the database somewhat for the move.