How to leave a dying forum

[bricabrach]

Forum URL: ombdinotopia.proboards.com

     This is a dying forum about a dying fandom -- where recently, two months went by with only one other member and me making any posts. We both decided to walk away. My problem is my many hundreds of original illustrations scattered through over 1500 posts. During the Photobucket tsunami it took an entire three-day weekend to move my pics to another service (there's twice as many now). I'm wondering what to do next:

• Keep paying ImageShack annually to preserve things as-is.
  
• Close down my ImageShack account & let the images disappear.
• Delete the affected posts first.
• Delete all my posts along with my Proboards account.

Unfortunately, any choice other than the first is not easily reversible. My ImageShack renewal is coming up. Most likely I'll keep it going for one more year. After that, well, I'm not getting any younger.  Any thoughts on what to do?

[Michael]

Hi bricabrach,

I'm sorry to hear that! I'm afraid I can't be a huge help on the image hosting front, though better and more image hosting options has been on my personal ProBoards wish-list for a while.

How many images/what total size (MB/GB) are we talking about? What about downloading a copy of your images and then uploading them to Google Drive in a folder and then linking that folder on the forum? Just trying to think broadly and potentially outside of the box.

What I do suggest is that you keep your forum, even if it's just in Maintenance Mode. While the images may not stay online in the same linked form you may still want to revisit the forum for the nostalgia in the future. I know many people come to us looking to restore forums just for the memories and it always disappoints me when we aren't able to help. While your forum may never be the same as it once was, there is often times joy to be found in those memories of a familiar place.

[bricabrach]

     Hi Michael,

     Thank you kindly for your thoughtful answer.  Your Google idea is interesting.  My illustrations top out at 1024x768, many are smaller -- they total perhaps 1 GB which would easily fit in a basic Google account.  I don't know Google's policy on hotlinking (which caused the trouble with Photobucket).  Honestly, I would rather keep on paying ImageShack than investing about 50 hours manually moving the 700 or so images -- the time wouldn't pay me very well.  Uploading them is easy, going through all my posts and manually re-linking them, not so much.  And ImageShack has been 100% reliable, unlike others I've tried. Of course, I'd like to see Proboards host the images at a reasonable cost.  if they do, it needs to feature automated transfer from an existing image host.

     As for maintenance mode -- neither me nor the other active member are staff.  Our admin hasn't been on since December 2020, at which time they switched the forum to members-only due to some spam.  It would make more sense to arrange for only logged in members to post while anyone can see.  Yet our moderator, who would like to change that, cannot.  And that may not help anyway.  Since this change, we gained more members who may have previously lurked as guests, now they log in and lurk instead.   Viewing threads on the Your Forum section, there appears to be three things that kill a forum -- lack of subject interest, absentee staff, and non-active members.  We have all three.

     Looking back on my OP, it doesn't fit in here very well -- or anywhere else in PB Support since the other boards are for staff.  Thus, I appreciate your indulgence as I express my mourning over this forum.  As a little thank-you, here's one of my favorite pics -- it will likely get more exposure here than on the Dinotopia forum!  Made during the Covid pandemic, it's captioned, Herd immunity.



     Best,
     Bob