Is there any possibility to moving the forum to it's own domain and another platform controlled by the moderators? I know forumup is free, but if we could get say 7 members to commit to $1 per month we could make the move. I'd be willing to pitch in for 1/7th.
The issues I see being a problem are:
1) Moving to another platform other than phpbb might loose some of the funtionalities. I was reasearching reviews on SMF and phpbb and it appears that SMF has the upperhand. (
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=55438 and
http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35601)
2) Moving existing messages over might have problems. SMF has a feature to convert phpbb to their format, but it might be worth a trial run before making a move. You would also have to be able to create an archive of the phpbb forum and use a converter here
http://www.simplemachines.org/download/?converters.
3) Who handles the money and sets up the account with the webhost? I think Laaz and moderators have proven themselves to be trustworthy individuals that will be around the forum for a while, but would it be something anyone would want to tackle. Maybe a Paypal account for donations to keep the forum going?
Anyway, just some thoughts . . . (probably dumb, but I thought I'd throw them out there anyway). Maybe since we have a number of threads on other fruits and tropicals, the domain could be generic like "gardenfruits.com" and then subdomains could be "citrus.gardenfruits.com", "plums.gardenfruits.com", etc. I think Gardenweb would be similar, but they only have a "fruits" forum and don't have specific varieties that I know of.
Phillip
