The last 2 threads that 'broke' ie they 'hang' and you can't see replies (and you get that orangey thing up top) were because of images being uploaded so I personally am going to try to avoid that although that's makes using the 'Creative' thread a bit dangerous.
Anyway, if anyone else notices anything that triggers the breakages please post here.
I believe that Iain has previously said that he has contacted the Community Manager with issues he has discovered.
Why don't they use MyBB or phpBB, then employ an undergrad developer to customise the frontend? It's as expensive or cheap as you want it to be. But having a solid, secure, actively developed and well known backend, is more important than aesthetics. And when people talk about hosting costs, they are also as expensive or as cheap as you want them to be. You can pick up high end dedicated servers or buy a used server from ebay and deploy it into a datacenter for not crazy amounts nowadays. I've done forums with thousands of people active for a couple hundred pounds (lowendbox has many deals). Hell I did an entire gaming community for less than £1000/year, including two 64 player game servers, a forum, website and a map repository, hosted on two OVH dedicated servers running out of Paris, with a full LAMP stack. It took five hours to deploy the site and three of us a day to get everything working. Then it was just maintenance beyond that. Volunteer mods administrated the forum and I logged in to the server 3-4 times a month to fix anything that needed fixing and deal with updates.
What is the actual data usage for autism.org.uk? Are they really moving crazy amounts of data every month. If so, why?
What is the forum data usage per month?
When people start talking about £20-30k, I wonder exactly who the hell they are using because that is like government level wastage. We aren't talking about building a new website, just deploying a new forum that is a bit more industry level and not some bespoke system that locks you into wasting crazy amounts of money over longer periods.
For example using one of the companies I currently deploy projects with (Ramnode) and assuming this charity required a crazy spec'd system, so say the highest spec Premium VPS (16 cores, 32GB Ram, 600TB SSD, 18TB/month) would set you back $192/month or roughly £1700/year. But that level of system is crazy for a website and forum. For a website and forum you could use far less without it breaking a sweat. I'd employ someone for 3-5 hours every month to keep everything running. There are often second and third line support personnel that will take on side projects doing admin tasks on servers, to make a little extra as a side hustle.
The big problem is outsourcing. It always is. Companies and charities can't be bothered to develop their own solutions, so they outsource it to someone who bends them over the table and you end up with an HS2 level clusterfk that you throw money at for the long run and if you are unlucky the company you use goes out of business and you are royally screwed at that point, with no nothing. I'm not a fan of outsourcing and in my past life I helped a few companies who lost everything when things went wrong. I believe companies should keep some stuff in-house and not rely on others to do it. It moves away from blame deflection and introduces personal responsibility.
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