UMSF will close, Jan 1st 2025 Options

[fredk]

I came over here from the "yellow forum" 20 years ago - the increase in S/N was like night to day. I've always been into the more technical side of imagery - night imaging, pulling out subtle DDs, triangulating few-pixel-tall features on the horizon (and that's with Phil-o-vision!) as Oppy made her way to Endeavour. What a blast it's been working with people like Tesheiner, Phil, James Canvin, to name just a few, on all that. And to get the technical insights from folks like Paolo and mcaplinger. I sure hope I can find somewhere else to do that kind of stuff.

And how cool it's been to see the infectious enthusiasm of members like Stu and ustrax!

And endless thanks for all the work from the moderators who kept this place so fantastic for two decades.

It's a real shame we don't have the people to migrate to and maintain phpBB/simple machines/whatever. I would've been willing to help out, though I'm not a (real) web developer. Is such migration possible without continuing maintainance, ie converting to phpBB and throwing the forum up somewhere, but in a frozen read-only state, ie no new posts, for the sake of historical record? Presumably that would be a lot cheaper than migrating to an active forum.

I'm also going to reach out to the server hosts to asks if they can snapshot the entire system and send it to me in some way come the shutdown at the end of Dec.

I'm curious - what roughly is the total size of the forum, obviously mainly the attachments?