Reason for upgrade

[Fire_Storm]

Hello everyone.

I have seen a few comments made about colors and asking why we switched. I am here to answer a few of those questions.

To get right to the point, Main contributing factor was technology. The old website was built and coded on a programming language php in this case was php5. php5 is several years old and support for is fading extremely fast. PHP7 has replaced it and anything coded in php5 will not work on php7. If you noticed the last day the old website was running, hardly anything worked. That would be the reason. Luckily we seen this coming last year and started brain storming ideas for replacement. Some of you knew this while others didn't.

Another contributing factor was cost. Running these services are not free. Everything is paid for by generous donations or paid for out of pocket by a few. I will not mention names for privacy reasons but Thank You! The old website was hosted at godaddy, which in my opinion and others tend to agree is completely way over priced and extremely lacking in features and performance. We have moved to a new host which is much more cost efficient and more robust in performance and technology. This helps us in many ways to grow and keep things alive for your enjoyment.

Godaddy also did not allow for 3rd party SSL certificates. (Secure Sockets Layer) Instead they required we purchased the certificate from them at $100 a year. This is outrageous and goes completely against industry standards. New host allows us to use any SSL certificate we want. To explain a little bit about what SSL does. SSL encrypts all data transferred between you and the server providing a more secure experience. Further, Web browsers have started to require any page you visit to use SSL and search engines have started to negatively impact sites not on SSL. The new site uses lets-encrypt, which is a free and widely supported certificate registry.

Security was also another huge factor in the switch. Again this falls back on the platform the old website was on php-nuke. This CMS (Content Management System) project was last updated in 2013 making it 6 years without security and patch updates. So at any moment the old site could of been hacked with valuable and possible private information stolen. I have seen it happen before first hand (several years ago a website running php-nuke on a server I own was hacked. Luckily the security measures I had in place stopped the hack within seconds and protected the data of other clients. There was nothing I could do for the hacked site though.) The new CMS called Wordpress and forums phpbb3 is much more secure, updated frequently and has a lot more features which still are not all implemented yet. Expect to see the ability to change the site colors to your liking when logged in with many more features yet to come. A brief outline of our security practices can be read in our Privacy Policy

To answer a few more questions...

What happened to the the old site? A:) We still have all the files and databases of the old site stored safely and securely on a few private servers. And we will be working migrating some of that data back into archives on new site in the future.

What about the new sites colors? A:) Please be patient things are still being worked on and will continue to be worked on. Things happened about 3 or so weeks before we initially thought they would and we had to move right then. So again I ask you please just bear with us and continue to provide input in a constructive and positive way.

If you have any comments or concerns this is the place for it. So feel free to post here.

Thank you again to everyone who has contributed both monetarily and supportive with ideas and your work.