Well, from my point of view as a long time forum user.... Wouldn't be too keen on moving permanently to an Ad funded "free" forum. These are not really meant for the large storage and bandwidth requirements of active forums, instead it's meant more as a way to generate the domain owner essentially "free" revenue from visitors to small specific interest groups (pets, unofficial fan based topics, foods, clubhouse / special interest groups from another site, etc). The adverts generally only pay out for unique "clicks" and tend to either lower funding or stop it altogether once the same IPs are repeatedly being seen by the ad server. This has an impact on what is profitable and not, and you can be sure that ANY forum that is using more storage and data bandwidth than it earns through Ad revenue, will be either restricted or s**t-caned PDQ....
Also if the likes of forummotion or other free forum providers have any technical issues, it is very unlikely that we would be able to report or expect a fix to problems we encounter, given that these sites are often not actively maintained by an individual we can contact. If the site Admins deem the quick / cheapest fix to a problem is to wipe the database, expect this to happen without warning!
Free forums are a lifeboat, or floating debris at best......we need a ship.
My vote would be For Von Corax to take over and arrange new hosting that is more inline with our current requirements. I am happy to help with this however I can.
Sadly I am no longer in touch with someone who could have provided us with a heavily discounted hosting package, and we are talking real 'high tier' commercial grade hosting in the USA too.
A number of years ago when BG was having issues with bandwidth, I was able to quickly arrange a pretty sweet deal, however the powers that be had already arranged to move BG to a new hosting company (which didn't last too long either - we were a big forum back in the day). I offered twice over the years, but nobody was interested / had other plans, and so I stopped offering my help. I haven't spoken to my contact in about seven years, and no idea where to find them now.
