I recently found out that Politirant, a political forum I went to for quite a while in which many of its members stumped me as far as debate on many occasions, seems to have been shut down, and I don't know what caused it or anything--but I wanted to let anyone know who may have posted there that you're totally welcome to come here and debate.

I made a message about this already, but I just wanted to reiterate that if the theme/skin I have on here as standard is offputting, all you have to do is go to the bottom of any page here on this forum and change the style pulldown menu to the ProSilver theme and it will appear like a regular forum.

I really wish I knew what happened over at Politirant, it always seemed to be doing well.

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Political Buddies

Yeah, I'm not sure what happened over there. It was kind of abrupt.

I see that another member has already registered here.

I posted this same thing in another thread, but I wanted to say it again:

One of the members opened up another political forum, but I'm sorry, I don't like ProBoards forums, not only do people have to put up with ads, there's no customization on them--no embedding youtube videos, and just in general ProBoards are just not very good. Before I got this forum up and running I had a ProBoards forum, so I know all about them. You also can't back up the database on a ProBoards forum, so if something happens, that's it, it's a done deal.

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Political Buddies

I was able to find a good email to the admins over there, but never got a reply.

ProBoards is what it is - a free forum tool. It does have some useful add-ons but you have to work them in with script. I agree, a dedicated forum is probably the best option but for a free forum, ProBoards isn't that bad. If the site starts to get big, I might go over to a dedicated forum if I can get some ad hits to offset the cost of the server.

You can embed Youtube videos, it requires some criteria but there's an icon that loads the criteria for you. Ads - I use Firefox with Adblock and they're all gone. I recommend Firefox and Adblock to anyone who gets pissed off at being slammed with ads like I do.

The problem is, if you do switch over to a different forum, you cannot backup the database. When I switched over, I copied/pasted about 1,000 messages over by hand in order for them to be on this forum.

I might be able to host another forum on THIS server if you wanted as well. There's still about a gig left of storage left.

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Political Buddies

I appreciate the offer Kizz, but I'm going to leave the forum as it is. It's been fairly active lately and if it gets any more active, I might reconsider - although I don't know how much space will ultimately be needed.

It's got about 1,800 posts so far - in about two weeks. I'm not sure how quickly that rate would chew up a gig.

it's a pain in the ass setting that shit up too.

Forums and messages on forums don't usually take up much space. The entire database of this forum, for instance, is about 20mb.

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Political Buddies

This is the forum that is being talked about: http://www.politichat.proboards.com/index.cgi

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Political Buddies

Kizz - I bought a domain name for Politichat and I'm thinking about moving to a dedicated server at this point. Activity has been pretty good and members are slowly trickling in and Politichat is the top google hit right now so it might be a good time to move it to a server and put a custom forum together.

Now I don't know shit about this kind of shit - I'm figuring it out as I go, but I might want to talk with you about a dedicated forum. I really wanted to put a forum together to keep the group in tact, but it's a challenge for me. Maybe we could collaborate our efforts and combine these forums into something that we have total control over and can promote and maintain effectively. You have my email, I can PM my cell phone number to you - let's talk about it if you are interested.

Thanks

Cool cool.

Right now I'm in the process of switching to a new host provider, and am getting some bugs out of the switch. Once I have that fully going, that should be a definite possibility.

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Political Buddies