END OF AN ERA, FRACTALFORUMS.COM IS CONTINUED ON FRACTALFORUMS.ORG

So since this poll has ended up being rather conclusive, is there any kind of timeline you can share? Or is this still being discussed?

as sock put it, the transfer will take longer than assumed by me, it is crucial but since this is not a single page website the transfer will take, it will be the least painful for users as possible which means accounts will come with, and a nice clean rework of how things are organized is planed to make it into the update

@sebastian leveraging server load would help a lot the php version is in fact the most crucial thing that is making problems, like the wrong encoding of escaping special chars has obviously changed

i made a huge effort a few years ago to deliver images using a cdn and putting them on a different server, this is a tedious process, the front page loading is quite hacky because in fact i display html scaled full images for the gallery comments, it is indeed quite heavy, checking out modern templates will also go into that process

regarding general server calculation time, the new forum will start with blank content, so everything related to database queries will get a small boost, but a huge site with full fledged dynamic queries on front page will still be a huge problem, displaying user information, bot information, recent posts, recent gallerys and all that sum up to the very slow loading of frontpage, this is nothing i can adress without diving deep into the forums system, many many stuff and plugins is draining the performance

and at the end of the day everything is hosted on a 20Euro server so they do a pretty good job in hosting this site for 10 years now and this will continue as it was before, so, low budget hosting will continue, perhaps some kind of static front page could help but as i said it would introduce fine tuning which is not planned, the plan is to bring the forum on the current software base and make up for latest php and sql  and old security issues like sessionid transfered in url using non https servers is the foremost thing to achieve with the update

performance is not main priority, content delivery sytems that can easily wordwide performance is a thing that is relatively easy, for dynmic pages not so much but for the static content it is important

My suggestion for a safe upgrade:
1. create a new folder for the next website: /var/www/next.fractalforums.com
2. create a new apache config for another domain: next.fractalforums.com and point to new created folder
3. download and unpack newest stable 2.x version of smf to the new folder and test if running
4. export and import old database to new system (hope smf has got a script todo that)
5. install plugins (hope none have vanished in new version)
6. check everything is running
7. point the general domain at /var/www/next.fractalforums.com
8. archive old system (web and database)

points 1 - 6 can be done and tested without interfering with the existing fractalforums.com (except for some generated server load)
if step 4 till 8 can happen quickly, thats fine, otherwise the fresh changes to the database have to be reimported to the new system.

In order to safe upgrade PHP and co, there is no way todo this on one machine (except for do and pray  )

I think the forum search searches locally to the subforum you are in, so if you want to find everything from all subforums you better click Home first...

lets hope the text indexing will get fixed in updated forum, still having problems getting it to run though and soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo few time