As some of you may already know, the SFN server hardware is currently located in the UK. 

I will quote from what was announced to the staff:

“This year the UK government passed a bill called the Online Safety Act. A brief description of the Act is set out here, but the tl;dr of it is that there are now a set of laws in place in the UK that put a duty of care on operators of social media sites in order to make them accountable for the things that are posted on those sites, which could be harmful to children and other users. The focus in the media has mostly been around the larger sites like Facebook, but actually, the act is extremely broad”

The upshot of this is that a modest operation like ours can’t be hosted in the UK on servers run by SFN; the requirements are too onerous and no individuals should be asked to take on the liability should someone find that weren’t compliant in some detail. It’s not enough to think we’re taking the right steps, and we don’t have lawyers on retainer to make sure of things. (Small UK bulletin board sites might be shuttering by the end of this week if their owners are aware of what’s going on)

Shifting to a hosting option that avoids this is moving forward. This might end up being completely transparent to our members and visitors, but Murphy always seems to pop up and invoke their law, so there might be disruptions. We will keep you apprised as more information becomes available.

OSA was enacted into law in October 2023, almost eighteen months ago.  Must be moving pretty slowly if we're only now getting marching orders.  

A friend was pretty happy with LiquidWeb, FWIW.  They handle transfers well.  From personal experience (with a site that went belly up recently, and we members were not treated well when trying to get information), I would avoid A Small Orange.  

15 hours ago, TheVat said:

OSA was enacted into law in October 2023, almost eighteen months ago.  Must be moving pretty slowly if we're only now getting marching orders.  

Some of the key provisions only take effect in the coming weeks, which is why it becomes important now.

We're looking into a hosting service provided by Invision, who make the forum software we use. They have a specialized service for forums, and if it proves suitable, we'll use that for the ease of transition.

1 hour ago, Cap'n Refsmmat said:

Some of the key provisions only take effect in the coming weeks, which is why it becomes important now.

We're looking into a hosting service provided by Invision, who make the forum software we use. They have a specialized service for forums, and if it proves suitable, we'll use that for the ease of transition.

Did you try OVHCloud VPS (virtual private server) ?

4 UKP per month.

 

1 hour ago, Sensei said:

Did you try OVHCloud VPS (virtual private server) ?

4 UKP per month.

We've certainly used VPS services in the past, but shared resources like this usually don't interact well with the database, as this tends to be both I/O heavy and require a decent amount of memory for good performance. In addition there is a certain amount of maintenance that requires quite a bit of time to keep things ticking over, which is what I have mostly been doing in the background for some time now. The service that Cap'n mentions above is probably better suited to the future needs of the site, since it'll be maintained by the forum providers, and run on appropriate hardware to enable a responsive forum.

Good luck with the move team, and thanks for the heads up.

 

Side note: Would be lovely if a side benefit of the migration is an improvement around the experiences noted here (fully recognize that's neither the goal nor a guarantee): 

 

We're getting ready to make the move, and the migration may be as soon as next week (the week of April 6). This will involve several hours of downtime, probably during the morning hours US/UK time. I'll update as soon as I know the exact time.

iNow, regarding ads, part of the switch also involves moving ad accounts. You may notice there are no ads at all right now because we have to get re-approved for Google ads. If that doesn't work, we'll switch to another revenue source... incidentally, if anyone would be willing to pay, say, $5/mo to help fund our hosting, we may be able to set that up after we migrate.

SFN will be read-only starting tonight (April 6), late in the evening US time, for migration early Monday morning. Once the migration is complete we will need to update our DNS records, so it may take your computer an hour or two to switch to the new host. I expect the site will be available and open by Monday evening US time, and probably sooner if all goes well.

The migration will also upgrade us to version 5 of the forum software, so expect things to look a little different. We'll try to iron out any kinks over the following weeks.

We're getting ready to make the move, and the migration may be as soon as next week (the week of April 6). This will involve several hours of downtime, probably during the morning hours US/UK time. I'll update as soon as I know the exact time.

iNow, regarding ads, part of the switch also involves moving ad accounts. You may notice there are no ads at all right now because we have to get re-approved for Google ads. If that doesn't work, we'll switch to another revenue source... incidentally, if anyone would be willing to pay, say, $5/mo to help fund our hosting, we may be able to set that up after we migrate.

Any updates you have on some kind of subscription to help fund the forum you have, I'm willing to listen to that pitch. All I'd want to know is how far a fiver a month will go for you guys. Whatever reduces your ad reliance I'm game for really.

Whatever reduces your ad reliance I'm game for really.

2nd that. (I'd prefer an annual payment, and not automatically deducted)