I'm very pleased to announce that after 10 a LOT of hours invested that I am very close to closing up this old broken site and forum.
I am going to need some volunteers to try out the new forum before it goes live. I'm not quite ready to do a "public beta", but need some testers.
If you are will to help, please contact me at my temporary email of beachcats@thebeachcats.com and mention you saw this post.
I realize the forums have been in such a mess that not many are checking here, so if you know how to contact other members who would be willing to help please share this info with them.
I'm looking into signing up for a bulk email service like MailChimp, SendGrid, or Brevo in order to contact the rest of the registered members when there is more to check out and when the new site is launched. so if you have any tips on the best of those paid services to use please let me know.
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Damon Linkous
1992 Hobie 18
Memphis, TN
How To Create Your Signature
How To Create Your Own Cool Avatar
How To Display Pictures In The Forums.
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Completely New TheBeachcats.com Coming Soon!
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- Rank: Administrator
- Registered: Jul 19, 2001
- Posts: 3452
Posted: Jan 26, 2025 - 07:11 PM
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- Rank: Mate
- Registered: Jan 14, 2004
- Last visit: Jan 26, 2025
- Posts: 878
Posted: Jan 26, 2025 - 11:47 PM
This is GREAT news! Awesome Damon. I can volunteer to test out the new site or help out where I can.
Thanks
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Philip
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- Rank: Mate
- Registered: Sep 23, 2022
- Last visit: Jan 27, 2025
- Posts: 115
Posted: Jan 27, 2025 - 11:51 AM
Happy to help. I've gained a lot here. -
- Rank: Administrator
- Registered: Jul 19, 2001
- Posts: 3452
Posted: Jan 27, 2025 - 02:43 PM
Thanks Philip and westmatt! I've received four other offers of support this morning by email.
I'm very close to launching the staging site with the all new forum. I've spent the last dozen days (and nights) getting the forums migrated to a forum software called WPForo. There is a lot of beachcat history and content that I couldn't bear to lose.
19 Forums, 8,504 Topics, 75,700 Posts, 37,700 Members
The forum is by far the most difficult migration, I'm also working on a new:
- Classifieds: I've identified two systems that would work and am doing test migrations to see which works best. The current classifieds are still working and still very active.
- Photo Album Archive: The old photo albums at https://www.thebeachcats.com/pictures won't be needed in the same way on the new site, since it will have the ability to upload images in a post, but the content has to be saved for posterity. It contains 24,502 photos in 1,618 albums and uses nearly 6 GB of storage. I've already successfully migrated this to a modern responsive photo gallery called Piwigo.
- Calendar: Surprisingly hard to find web software that offers the same features as the one from 22 years ago but that is done.
- News articles: These have been migrated to WordPress blog posts successfully. Will make it so much easier to create news articles about the beachcat world.
Lots of other odds and ends and to migrate but I feel more confident now than ever that it will happen.
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Damon Linkous
1992 Hobie 18
Memphis, TN
How To Create Your Signature
How To Create Your Own Cool Avatar
How To Display Pictures In The Forums.
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