My apologies to all for posting this here, but at the moment I don't have many options. Should this post be deemed inappropriate, I respect the decision of the moderators should they decide to delete it.

The Narrow Gauge Discussion Forum is offline, and from what little I have been able to ascertain it appears that the server crashed Friday morning my account was suspended following the crash. Unfortunately, I have not been able to contact anyone with sufficient authority to re-establish the account and have the site restored, however I am working on it (or rather, waiting for responses to multiple e-mails and messages). The NGDF will be back as soon as I can arrange to have it restored.

Again my apologies for this post here, but I felt there was sufficient interest to justify a disruption of the appropriate content of this board.

Don Richter

Anything remotely within the scope of the Narrow Gauge Discussion Forum is relevant to the mission of this forum as far as this moderator is concerned.

Kevin

Thanks Kevin, I appreciate it.

Now for an update. We've found a new home for the NGDF, and hope to have it up fully functional under it's old domain name soon. The first step though is to download all of the archives. I still do not have access to the data, and have not been able to start this process yet.

At this point, I would like to ask that people refrain from trying to access the old NGDF. The host company has made it clear that our rickety, clunkey old soak of a BBS is too slow and inefficient for their system. If they see attempted traffic fall off they might be more cooperative in letting me back in.

While on the subject of the archives, once downloaded they will be moved to the new host and set up so they will be publicly available, however this is a lower priority to getting things back up and running so it might not happen immediately.

Now to the bad(?) news. I've wanted to upgrade the "back end" of the NGDF for several years now, but have generally been too lazy to do it. However at this point I see no reason not to go ahead with the switch. The main reason is simply that we've been running a soak when everyone else has gone to superheat ( if not mag-levs). This is probably what happened on Friday, the old soak couldn't keep up and blocked the ROW. Anyway, we've set up two test forums for people to play with. Please note that they have NOT been fully configured yet and do not yet have all the bells / whistles / and other claptrap they might end up with, uh, in the end. While I do reserve the right (privelege) to make the fial call on which one we go with, I would be interested in peoples' input.

The first test page can be found at:

http://aprivateplacetoplay.com/phorum/

It seems to be the closest to what we had and stands as my preference at this point.
The second is available at:

http://aprivateplacetoplay.com/punbb/

Please note that these are both test platforms and whatever is posted to them may or may not be kept for archival purposes. Also, colors fonts and that sort of thing have not been finalized.

More bad(?) news. In addition to the new format we will be going to a registration required format. The reasons have been spelled out numerous times, and I am still not happy with the idea, however registration does solve a lot of problems from flame wars to spam to inadvertant blockage of legitimate posters from the forum.

Again, I apologize for posting this here at RYPN, I know it's somewhat off topic, but it is something of interest to people here. I would imagine that the best place to discuss all of this is over at one or the other of the test platforms.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Don Richter