Sent another £10. Thank you for your efforts Chris

(22-08-2023, 09:12 PM)ian333 Wrote: Sent another £10.  Thank you for your efforts Chris

Thanks Ian, that's the first tenner towards next March

Another from Splashdown thanks

Alfie has been reimbursed £100 for the plaque and has made a donation, thanks Alfie.

I am holding £60 towards next year's bills thanks to our wonderful community.

The website domain name invoice has been paid, but not by me. I have asked Malcolm's nephew if he has paid it.

Total I am holding is thus £82 at present, next bill the hosting next Spring.

I'm guessing that the owner of the website probably sees the rights to the domain name as his main asset (in relation to the website he now owns)?

So probably paid it?

The hosting and hence security certificate expired and hence the site has been down most of the day.

The owner has received several warnings but taken no action I am told.

I could not get hold of the owner once again, so I have contacted the hosting company and paid the £94.95 invoice out of the £112.05 funds I had banked for the forum.

There is the second half of the bill to pay next week for just over £20 and that will exhaust the £17.10 I still hold.

Safe for another year! unless the owner closes the site over which I have no control.

I will make another attempt to contact the owner and find his intentions.

As far as the future is concerned then the same will happen this time next year as things stand. The hosting company have agreed to copy me in on invoices. I will make sure the other two admins have contact details for the hosting company and admin access to the forum in case anything happens to me.

Basically we need to discuss the future next Spring and decide if we want the forum to carry on. I'll look at the website that holds the forum and make it look a bit less abandoned, but I am not keen enough to regularly update it. The forum is, I feel, what most members want.

I'll manage the forum for the next year.

Thanks again to all who have contributed.

We are having some work done at my house from Thursday and my office will be out of commission for a few days. I have my phone and will keep an eye open but am unlikely to post. Good chance for me to do some long overdue spannering!

Good work Chris, thank you for all the hard work. We should all be paying a contribution towards your outlay.
Are there enough of us out there to send £10? each.

No need for a collection at present thanks. The residue from last year's similar problems and the collection for Malcolm's tribute has all but paid this year's bills. 

The main thing for the forum's survival is to find and train cover for me as another administrator for the forum. There is much less maintenance work to do since I restructured the forum to remove the annual boards that Malcolm's dedication was sufficient to maintain. There were a steady trickle of applications to join but 90% are spammers, I have identified and dealt with 130 applications in the last year, spammers are fewer now as I have applied bans to much of Asian IP addresses.

The website I need to bring up to date, which will involve freezing or removing Malcolm's news correspondents' database in the centre of the home page. It is an ancient package, years out of date and preventing updating the software version of both website and forum which are also years out of date. My problem is I am loath to risk losing so much history when I feel there are barely enough of us to keep this once great forum going, thus I have let sleeping dogs lie.

Thanks Chris for your hard work. Much appreciated.

Thanks again Chris - good job one of us knows what they are doing - or we'd be history by now.

I'll be happy to contribute in future.

Cheers

Sam

Yes, thanks Chris, Let us know if & when you need a top up.
I wish I could devote more time to the forum, when things at home are OK I can devote time to it, but then, when things become ermm..., more involved at home,
I struggle to find any time & can only have a quick log on to see what's new.

Apologies, this morning's outage was due to the domain expiring as I left it to the last minute to renew it out of the last of our funds, hoping the owner would pay/make contact.

I was wondering! 
mainly because it seemed intermittent, I managed to post a couple of things in between it being offline.

The hosting was still active as we paid for that two weeks ago

The URL that points browsers to the hosting had expired but may still have been cached on your device.