How old are we?
For anyone new to this forum, by looking at the topics and content you may think the classicamiga forums have only been running since the end of 2006. This is actually far from the case. We originally started the classicamiga forum way back at the end of 2002, making the forums a total of 5 years old at the end of 2007.
And the main website is even older, originally started by me before the forum and expanded over time.
Where did it begin?
The original members of classicamiga mostly met on the GameFAQ Amiga board, but due to the moderators on that site we quickly decided we needed a place of our own to chat and post about the Amiga.
Where did you move to?
The original classicamiga forum was hosted for free by a forum company called Invisionfree. They allow anyone to make a free forum based around the Invision Power Board software. It is completely free in exchange for them placing adverts on the forums.
This worked well for us to begin with due to us being a non-profit organisation/group. And while Invisionfree restricted the ability to add many extras to the basic forum, it did allow the ability to add a custom template to make it more unique.
We continued to keep the original forum on Invisionfree and this worked quite well. The only exception was that the search feature was always broken (and was never fixed).
What went wrong?
Everything continued to function well on the Invisionfree board until 2006. In November of 2006 the Invisionfree server hosting the classicamiga board suffered a harddrive failure. That's OK we though, they have stated they make "regular" backups of the servers in case of such events. But after more than a month of trying to find out what was happening we discovered the backups had been made to the same harddrive as the actual board!
So they restored the board with the newest backup they still had, which was from March! This meant losing over 8 months worth of posts and messing up a lot of the board structure in the process.So what did you do?
It was then that the decision was made. We needed a forum of our own, under our own control, that we could backup ourselves and know it would be backed up regularly.
So after much research we decided that vBulletin was the best forum software available, and offered a greater level of features and the ability for expansion more than any other forum, including the Invison board software we had become used to.
So I purchased it, setup a new server, and the result is the forum you are now using which went online at the end of last year (2006).
Access to the old forum
For those who haven't been with us for long I thought I would mention that our original classicamiga forum is still up and running. It is now locked so no new members can register, and no new posts or topics can be made. It is just there for historical purposes.
It can be found at http://oldforum.classicamiga.com
If you do take a look, remember that many of the posts made between March 2006 and November 2006 will display an error when you try to view them as they were missing when Invisionfree did the partial restoration of the forum.
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