Trust me when I say that we’re all frustrated about our forums being MIA. We know what a valuable asset they are, housing more than a decade’s worth of Q&As, ideas, suggestions, tutorials, house rules, and so much more, and because of that, we’re not about to let them go!

To explain to you all exactly what’s going on, allow me to hand control over to one of our resident webmasters, Brendan Quinn of Squid & Crow.

Take it away, Brendan!

Hey folks, Brendan from Squid&Crow here…

Jodi and Clint asked me to come out of my basement to give you an update on why the forums are taking so long to get back up. First, a little history… While peginc.com has been rebuilt a couple times from the ground up, the forums have largely stayed the same. phpBB, the software running the forum, had a massive essential upgrade that was performed a couple years back when we moved it over to pegforum.com, but aside from that it has largely been running on its own.

That all changed a few weeks ago when users started noticing that when they logged in, they were actually logging in as other users (with access to private messages, posts, etc). phpBB had another significant upgrade, and while we applied it successfully, it didn’t actually fix the login problem. Scouring support forums, running code reviews, etc., came up with nothing so we decided to shut the site down while we began a migration off of phpBB to vBulletin’s cloud services so that we could have forum software experts keeping an eye on things. 

The truth is, migration of this nature is outside of the Squid & Crow wheelhouse, so we needed to pull in another company specializing in data migration. The company we’ve been working with for the past few weeks has let us know now that for some reason their methodology of migration isn’t working with our database/server config and so we’re now searching for a new migration specialist. 

Believe us, folks, we want the forums back up as soon as humanly possible. And understand that we have the old site backed up completely from just as we were beginning to see the problem, so aside from the login issue being unresolved, the data is all still there. If you’ve had experience with migrating about 280,000 posts, and a few thousand user profiles from phpBB to vBulletin, shoot a note over to [email protected]. We’re happy to take referrals for this kind of service.

Thank you!