I'm very pleased to announce that after 10 a LOT of hours invested that I am very close to closing up this old broken site and forum.
I am going to need some volunteers to try out the new forum before it goes live. I'm not quite ready to do a "public beta", but need some testers.
If you are will to help, please contact me at my temporary email of beachcats@thebeachcats.com and mention you saw this post.
I realize the forums have been in such a mess that not many are checking here, so if you know how to contact other members who would be willing to help please share this info with them.
I'm looking into signing up for a bulk email service like MailChimp, SendGrid, or Brevo in order to contact the rest of the registered members when there is more to check out and when the new site is launched. so if you have any tips on the best of those paid services to use please let me know.
Thanks Philip and westmatt! I've received four other offers of support this morning by email.
I'm very close to launching the staging site with the all new forum. I've spent the last dozen days (and nights) getting the forums migrated to a forum software called WPForo. There is a lot of beachcat history and content that I couldn't bear to lose.
19 Forums, 8,504 Topics, 75,700 Posts, 37,700 Members
The forum is by far the most difficult migration, I'm also working on a new:
Classifieds: I've identified two systems that would work and am doing test migrations to see which works best. The current classifieds are still working and still very active.
Photo Album Archive: The old photo albums at https://www.thebeachcats.com/pictures won't be needed in the same way on the new site, since it will have the ability to upload images in a post, but the content has to be saved for posterity. It contains 24,502 photos in 1,618 albums and uses nearly 6 GB of storage. I've already successfully migrated this to a modern responsive photo gallery called Piwigo.
Calendar: Surprisingly hard to find web software that offers the same features as the one from 22 years ago but that is done.
News articles: These have been migrated to WordPress blog posts successfully. Will make it so much easier to create news articles about the beachcat world.
Lots of other odds and ends and to migrate but I feel more confident now than ever that it will happen.
We've had great response and feedback so far. About a dozen members are taking a deep dive to try and make a new better TheBeachcats.com for all of us.
Damon,
Just now seeing what you are doing with the site. Holy cow that's a lot of work!! Thank you so much for keeping this going and making it even better. We sure appreciate this.
Regards, mark
Thank you! Up till now I've only been sharing the URL of the new site under construction with those that have emailed me direct. I've have just moved the under construction site to it's real server on a staging URL. Anyone still reading these forums is welcome to come try out the replacement forums and event calendar.
I have migrated all the existing site members (usernames) over but not password to keep things secure. To create a password for the new site go to the login page at https://thebeachcats.tempurl.host/sign-in/
and use the "lost password" link to create a new password with your existing username.
Once you are logged in you can try out the parts that are ready.
If you have information for Catamaran related events, please add them to the calendar. https://thebeachcats.tempurl.host/submit-event/
So when we go live there will be a nice list of upcoming events.
I've already added the ones for OSYC.com since I do their website and have all the information needed.
Sometimes, migrating the site content to a modern platform has seemed "just around the corner" but many times it has seemed like a lost cause that I should cut my losses of lots of money and immeasurable time.
Here's where it stands today:
The staging site is located at https://thebeachcats.tempurl.host/
After the new site launch, the site will simply come up instead of this one at TheBeachcats.com .
I have also successfully migrated the 6GB photo gallery with it's 25,000 images, in 1500 albums along with all the attached album, and image titles and descriptions to a modern free standing phot archive at https://archive.thebeachcats.com/pictures/
This quite a feat, if I do says o myself, but I wasn't willing to lose that content contributed by the members over so many years. It required a lot of custom coding and the purchase of a separate hosting server to accommodate, but now those images and PDF's will continue to be available for future beachcat sailors.
The Classifieds has been a huge effort and is very important since they are still very popular and classifieds is the only income generator for the site.
Communications with the members. I have long wanted to send out a newsletter emails to the existing members explaining what is up and inviting them back to the new site. Sending mass emails is a tricky and expensive business with today's spam rules and safeguards. I have a practical solution built using Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) and the FluentSMTP/FluentCRM plugins which I have been testing.
So please hang in there, I want to make the move very much, in January I thought I was a month away and started paying for the second web server.
Nearly every feature on the new site required paid plugins and paid customization in order to recreate the functionality of this site, which was way ahead of it's time in 2002.
An issue I've been dealing with this week. After making a breakthrough on migrating the existing classified ads I started thinking about a time frame for launching the new site. First thing I thought of was that the forums migration was done in January. I paid a specialist database company $600 back then to migrate the forum posts from this extinct software (Zikula/Dizkus) over to the wpForo Wordpress forum. So if I simply launch the new site now, all posts here since January would be lost. I started trying to contact the company who did the migration to see if they could do an update on Sept. 1st and sent them an email every day, they haven't replied at all.
So if I can get the classifieds fully working, what is your opinion on losing those topics and posts and launching as soon as possible?