Get out your Sam Cook records, kids… A Change Is Gonna Come.
Fusor.net
has been in business since 1998 – I think that's like several centuries
in Internet years. Why, when we started this, it was all hand-cranked,
remember?
In the 15 years since its inception, Fusor.net has
had three major incarnations. First there was the very simple BBS
operated under the aegis of my 90's-era Internet music business,
Songs.com. Then there was a brief interval when it was hosted by a
service called "Intranets." When that enterprise faded into the digital
sunset, we set up our own forums using a platform called "w-agora" –
which was fairly state of the art at the time (about 2002).
So this platform has served us well for at least a decade. But now it, too, is about to go the way of the digital dodo…
A number of factors have arisen in the past few months that dictate a change:
1)
We discovered that users from Australia were having difficulty getting
consistent access to the site. Our host, Sitemason.com, was maintaining
a fairly high firewall in order to defend their servers against bots
from Asia, and that was causing problems for legitimate users on the
other side of the dateline;
2) The platform that we have been
operating on for the past decade has become quite antiquated and is no
longer supported by the developer. Sitemason has been precluded from
upgrading its services for other customers as long as the Fusor.net
boards were dependent on outdated circuitry;
3) Sitemason's own
business has evolved in such away that they are no longer able or wiling
to devote their limited resources to keeping the wheels of one site
rolling down the digital highway. I have done business with these
people since, oh, 1997 or thereabouts, and regard them as outstanding in
their field. It has always been a genuine pleasure to do business with
them. But their business has changed, and though they personally like
having a unique site like Fusor.net under their umbrella, the site is no
longer compatible with their business model and they've politely asked
us to find other hosting.
Accordingly, in the weeks ahead, two
major things are going to happen. One will be (hopefully) transparent,
and the other… well, not so much…
1) Fusor.net is going to move
to new servers. This in itself should/would not be disruptive, save for
the 24 hours or so it would take for the Domain Name Service (DNS)
change to propagate around the Internet. But while we're at it…
2)
The operational face of the forums is going to change dramatically
with the conversion from w-agora to the now default standard discussion
platform, phpBB. The user interface of phpBB is very different from
what we have become accustomed to with w-agora; the simple one-line
threading of discussion threads will be transformed into a format that
will be unfamiliar at first and will probably be a source of some
consternation while we're getting used to it.
The Fusor.net front
page – i.e. the "blog" portion of the site, will also be converted,
from TypePad to WordPress, but that will be of less concern to the
regular users of the forum.
We may not know until we get there
the full extent of the disruption For example, we don't know yet if we
will be able to transfer existing user registrations — user ID and
password – from the old platform to the new one. We're still
researching all the particulars. I will use this space to keep users
apprised as we learn more.
The tentative date for the transition
is April 22-25. It is likely, that the forums will be semi-closed for
at least several days while all of the engineering is implemented. By
"semi-closed" I mean that the existing forum will remain in a a "read
only" state, and new postings will not be allowed until the site is
re-opened in its new format and on its new servers.
That's the news, now HERE'S THE POINT: We're going to need to raise some money to get this done.
Fusor.net
has always been a free service and I have every intention of keeping it
that way. But we will need to raise something on the order of
$600-$800 to to implement all these changes. So it's time to pass the
virtual hat.
On the very front page of the site – https://fusor.net
– in the upper right corner, there is a link to my PayPal account. I'm
asking now for everybody who feels that they benefit from this site's
existence to go there now and pitch in whatever you can. Please make a
note on your submission that it is for "fusor.net" so I'll be able to
keep track of the contributions.
Things might be a bit chaotic
for a while, but I fully expect that we will survive any disruption.
Once we do, the site will be well positioned to flourish for another
decade or so.
And, hallelujah, by the end of that 10 years, practical fusion energy will only be another twenty years away!
OK, kids, please hurry over to the PayPal button now. Let's get this ball rolling…
(if you have anything to add to this discussion, please post your comments in the forums.)
Thanks,
Paul Schatzkin
aka The Perfesser
Founder of Fusor.net