Hi,
To Taco.22: nothing frantic, I just took the time to do it at the right moment for me, some quiet needed, and a clear idea of the steps I wanted to take. We had a long week-end here, and I have been able to contact the host late, it must have been tuesday or wednesday. I needed to ask if my contract was ok for this sort of setup (I have an account there... ). He said it's perfectly ok but might slow down my website...
I have installed a new SMF forum directly from the CPanel of the host, which has created a brand new database and a configuration file done automatically for the forum; I thought I would take just the config file from it and restore the rest but when I saw the brand new forum and the directories and files in the root directory (there is a cgi directory, for example) I thought I would better do the reverse side, copy all themes and plugins from the old site, check for differences in the files (diff is my friend) and from there drop the new databases and import the latest backup from the beta.linuxvillage.net forum. In between I had done a new backup of the forum once all brand new to be sure I could go backward in case of need without having to do it again from zero. The day before I had asked also for advice on the #smf forum, where I had again seen Yoshi who had strongly advised me to make use of a repair.php script which is provided by the SMF community for that sort of case : I used it once the files copied and the databases imported, and all went well, except for this encoding annoyance.
The worse annoyance when the forum was just done, about one or two hours later 6 spambots had registered and one spam was already posted. Bummer! I installed bad behavior, closed the submissions, removed the new "members" and the spam. Akh! How ugly of them to attack a poor baby forum!
To the question "shall we move again?":
I will try to keep the forum here as long as possible, and avoid moving again. One thing which will be good to have here is backups done automatically (still to be done, but one step at a time... the encoding issue was solved today thanks to Yoshi's help, on the #smf forum and thanks to the features available in the admin of the forum which allows re encoding it on the fly with two buttons to press).
The problem which might arise would be slowness due to the fact it is installed as domain companion on a hosting I have for some personal needs, and which is already not on a dedicated server.
In the future if it is too painful we might need to find another solution, but it should be a better solution and not a less good one, especially regarding to safety, and to automatic backups, and it should not be under circumstances such as a crash of the people maintaining the servers, leaving us without a forum and not knowing when it will be back again. It should be something planned, acknowledged by all and made as short as possible.
The forum is hosted by a small French company which has it's own data-center. You can see some pics here:
http://www.o2switch.fr/infrastructuresSoon a wiki will be available : the host is at legtux.org. It's installed, it misses only a few plugins, one for having two languages, a theme, and some finish.
Let's continue the fun and enjoy creating and helping each other!
