There was nothing wrong, functionally, with the old Message Board from WebsiteToolbox. It has served well for years and it gets a tremendous amount of usage (10,000-15,000 page views per month). Everyone loves it. Nevertheless, there are reasons it makes sense to switch.
- Our new hosting service which we switched to last month offers Message Board services for free. The old one costs $40/yr and more than 10,000 views per month results in extra charges which average about $1/month, becoming more expensive as Msg Board viewing is increasing at about 25%/yr. Now is the perfect time to take control of something which we don't even need to pay for anymore.
- Your NCCC webmaster must juggle additional username and password and deal with logging into a separate site to maintain the old external commercial Msg Brd. The next webmaster will only have to deal with one entity, HostMonster.com, for all aspects of the website - domain name, actual web hosting, add-on software and companion databases such as Message Boards (lots more is there as well should we need it under our current $4.95/mo "lease" - example: shopping cart for clothing orders)
- To access the data (for other uses - we never needed that before), old Msg Brd service charges $100. This is also the reason why it was impractical to export all the data from the old Msg Board here + WebsiteToolbox could not guarantee data integrity + it would require additional manual database programming.
Although the only real reasons to switch were financial and administrative, after testing this for about a week, I and the beta testers have been pleasantly surprised at the quality of this professional package. So, additional positives of the Simple Machines Forum software provided by our new hosting service, HostMonster.com, are:
- New Forum software was readily configurable for nearly identical behavior to maintain user satisfaction and minimize user complaints during the transition.
- Very professional interface - both for users and administration (completely customizable - we have the code)
- Many more additional features for registered users
- Have control over our data in a true database, which we can export at any time
- This is now part of our site, integrated in with the web pages - much easier for your webmaster to maintain
- Read a review Simple Machines Forum software (http://www.pcdoctor-community.com/blog/posts/2008/01/16/Simple-Machines-Forum-SMF-Review/).
If the change still aggravates you, Heidi Swanson advises, "Please visit Who Moved My Cheese? (http://www.whomovedmycheese.com) ;) "