It’s a bit like a disaster movie here.
My abiding passion, other than writing and playing guitar is rugby union. I’m not one of those bores who knows everything about the technical aspects of the game (even though they’ve never played – players are a different thing: they get respect), but I love the game. So much so, I’ve paid for and run a rugby forum for the last quarter of a decade. It sprang out of the BBC Scrum V forums which closed many moons ago after a few years of a lot of fans getting to know each other really well. Anyway, we didn’t want to lose what we’d built just because some bean counter at the BBC didn’t see any value in their rugby forum. So, I created a website running bulletin board software called the BBC Refusniks. That wasn’t a great name in the scheme of things, so we changed it to RugbyRebels.com – which was great until I forgot to renew the domain and it got nicked. So, we became NowRugby.com. Everyone hated that name, so I bought rugbyrebels.co.uk, rugbyrebels.club and rugbyrebels.co – all of which serve to identify the forum. We’ve stuck with that since.
We had a dedicated server for a while, which was pricey at the time – about £150 per month. Many contributed to the cost, but I was still out of pocket to the tune of about a grand a year. Membership soared and at one stage we had about 20k members, of which about 2-3000 were active on a regular basis. I monetised the site to try to cover the costs, and that worked really well until Google had a paddy and closed our account for spurious reasons. Another advertising agency cropped up and we did well with them for a while, then they gradually faded away. So for the last decade, we haven’t had any ads on the forum. This wasn’t financially sustainable, so I moved the forum to a VPS, which was better than shared hosting, but not as quick as the dedicated server. The membership had faded too, so we now have about 1500 members, of which about 100 are active. The VPS worked well up until Monday, when it broke irreparably.
The server had an update which broke everything – it IS ten years old after all. BUT I managed to rescue the database. Uploading it to a new server is the IT version of hell – it being 1.2 gigabytes. For the uninitiated, PHPMyAdmin will only allow uploads of 512megabytes, but it usually times-out after about 50 megabytes anyway. So I broke the DB down into discrete lots of 20 megs (to be on the safe side) and spent a happy day uploading it. Then I had to alter all the URLs etc. I didn’t manage to recover the smiley files and a few other things, but I’m happy I got most of the stuff done. There were a few times when I thought “Feck it, I’ve had enough of this”, but I ploughed on and after 16 hours, I managed to cobble together a new forum, and that’s where we are now. If you like rugby and don’t like the aggression of the usual rugby haunts (plus the dicks who have never played, but know everything about the game), then www.rugbyrebels.co.uk might just be your cup of tea.
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