Guys,
You may or may not know this but I’ve become the custodian and technical manager of this site.
Adam is moving on and about to start a very busy job so he needed someone to keep the site going who had a little more time, but just as much passion to see the site remain running.
I had the right profile, being both a passionate supporter, avid contributor of the site and had the technical skills & resources to take it on so this was quickly agreed. I have also built and manage another discourse site for my local community and am a huge fan of the software on which it is based.
Now, of course, we could have simply shut down the site and encouraged everyone to adopt one of the FB groups, but of course not everyone is comfortable with discussing their health on FB and others prefer this site’s anonymity. It also represents an unprecedented huge repository of advice and personal experience that is clearly invaluable to new sufferers and the experienced alike. All in all we were keen to keep this site going.
SO:
As part of the transition I’m going to move the site to my preferred hosting solutions. This will help me leverage my skills and minimise costs.
I’ve already built the new server and within the next few days I should, touch wood, be updating the domain to point to the new server, in Paris!
If all goes to plan, no data will be lost and downtime will be minimal. I will in any case take steps to ensure the site is rebuildable over and over so if anything goes wrong, nothing is lost.
Logins should remain the same and hopefully mail delivery will not change, but please check your spam folder if you are concerned you are not receiving site notifications.
The site will be set as Read Only during the transition, and hopefully that will be for as little time as possible (you might even be asleep!) Please forgive me for any hiccups, but hopefully things will go smoothly.
I know how important this site is to everyone and I intend to look after her.
I will continue to run it much as it was and it will remain a place for open and free discussion. I’ve been hugely impressed with the positivity, kindness & civility displayed here and the crowd is great, so I don’t see much challenge on the moderation front.
I wish to thank @adam and @scott for founding this amazing place (which I feel it’s not too dramatic to say has probably even saved lives!) and I wish Adam well in his future career and for entrusting me with their baby: It really is an honour.
I will be taking on the cost of running the site, personally. Initially I will not require contribution but perhaps we can work out in the future some way of sharing the cost if people want to support me. And to that end I will not rule out mild monetisation of some kind, e.g. ads, at some stage, but for now it’s unnecessary.
See you on the other side (but feel free to continue to use the site even in Read Only),
Happy Holidays,
James