You guys are great.... Barb too...
It'll be a while before 650rider is up and running again since Gerald is being a little slow in transferring everything over, but I hope it'll be back up in less than a week.
Once it does come back online, there should be no rush to copy and paste everything over here since the information isn't going anywhere. And as I said before, it will be read only. Things need to be transferred here in an efficient and organized manner. It needs to be done that way so that redirects can be setup for each thread or chunk of information that is moved. That way if some other site (like a blog or another forum) had linked to a thread on 650rider that is now here, when someone clicks on the link, they will automatically get redirected to the correct thread here. The same idea applies to search engines. You want to redirect them to the new content.
In the next few days (hopefully) I'm going to start another thread where I will go over all the details again about getting the information moved over. I'll probably be creating a temporary forum here where members here can identify individual threads that are worth saving.
There are basically two ways the information could be moved over. The first methods is members could copy and paste their builds and how to articles to new posts here. The second method is certain threads (or certain posts from threads) could be imported here. Or maybe certain pieces of information would be best if recreated here and other stuff might be better to import it. Either way, there will have to systematic method so the redirects can be set up properly. So don't start copying and pasting everything here until I give the go ahead. Initially we'll just want to identify the threads and posts that contain information worth saving and the temporary forum will be set up so everyone can help with that job. While that is going on, I'll be testing the importing procedures behind the scenes to make sure everything works like it is supposed to. If it all works out, there will probably be a couple of phases of imports to make sure we don't miss anything.
A lot of things can go wrong with importing. The BBcodes (forum specific codes used to format your posts like bolding text and inserting images and links) all need to be converted in each post as well as dealing with things like attachments and linking accounts for people that have accounts on both sites. There are scripts that do these tasks but they need to be setup and tested. There will probably be a specific thread for people to identify what their username was on 650rider if it is different than here. That will help when testing the linking of accounts.
If the importing procedure isn't as clean I'd like it or doesn't work for some reason, then the backup plan will be to just have members move the information over manually. It would provide for an opportunity to clean up some of the tech information as it gets moved over. For things like build threads, we could work out a way to have the replies included if it comes to that.
So as I said before, bear with me as this all happens over the next few weeks or even couple of months. It should be back up soon but there shouldn't be mad copying and pasting going on. You could copy it all down for your own use and paste it into a word document or something but don't paste it here. Not until we're ready. We need to stay organized so we don't just have a mess.
All of the above is subject to change since once I have access to the database and everything I might come up with a better solution to all of this. I'll let everyone know more as I know more.
Thanks for all the support.