Anyone know what happened to Painters Pitstop

Puma · Post by **Puma** » Fri Jul 01, 2022 11:31 am

Bob225 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 01, 2022 9:14 am Meh, it's just another abandoned forum, owners lose interest, or it's not making enough to cover the bills, typically the site will stay up until the domain expires, or the server is taken down

its now gone

Post by **ultimatehandyman** » Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:22 am

Sadly, running a forum is not easy and is not a lot of fun to be honest!

I’ve been members of several forums myself over the years and they often go away without a warning. I’m lucky, but only because of the moderators and forum regulars on here

It’s a thankless task, often people have no idea of just what is involved.

Firstly, you need a domain name, which is relatively inexpensive at about £20 per year (you can get some for £1.99, but you might have problems)
Now you have the domain name, you need some hosting space, you can get a shared hosting account for £60 per year, but don’t expect the site to work if the site gets busy and expect support not to be great. For a comparison this site has run on a dedicated server for the last ten years costing almost £500 per month, yesterday I received an email saying that the price of the server is going up by 17.5% per month, due to the cost of electricity! Luckily, we moved to cloud hosting a few weeks back (hopefully that will be reliable).

Forum software-
There are several options available for forum software, some are free and some are paid for. A popular choice is PHPBB, which this forum uses. Installing the forum software and connecting to a MYSQL database is relatively easy, but updating the forum software can be difficult, and if you do it incorrectly, you can make a real mess of things. Updates are needed every time the software developers update the forum software, or vulnerabilities might exist in older versions.

Server software-
If you have a shared hosting account, the chances are that the hosts will update the server software, but we got in a problem a few years back when the Cpanel software reached it’s “end of life”, this meant that some of the website’s scripts were using older versions of PHP, than newer servers, so moving the site to a new server was not a simple task, because they were running a different version of PHP, which was not backwards compatible (apparently).

Hackers-

Yes, people will try to hack into the website. I once mentioned this in another forum some years back and some members openly took the p!ss, one reply was something along the lines of “Jesus, you run a DIY website, do you seriously think that hackers are going to try and hack into your website, they will be more likely to hack the FBI”. Anyway, we have been hacked at least once, where they found a vulnerability in a script on the site (the script was removed some years back). On one occasion they attacked a portion of the site and uploaded a large Anti-sematic image, then complained to the people who owned the server- who then threatened to close the server down!

Spammers-
Over the years we have had major problems with spam, but luckily the PHPBB modifications and the forum moderators, often remove the spam before it is seen by other members.

Advertising-
The server is expensive to run, although the site is completely free for people to use, it is paid for by advertising (Google AdSense). Most forum members will never see the ads in the forum, as they are not shown to people with more than 100 posts, but people often complain about the adverts. They then say Facebook is better, because there are no adverts on Facebook (yes people don’t believe that there are adverts on Facebook), also this site does not collect your data, or sell it to other people!

People falling out-

This used to be a major issue every year at Christmas time, when the pressure of everything spills over into the forum and people fall out. There is a mod installed in the forum friend/foe mod, if someone is annoying you, all you have to do is click on the foe button in their profile and you will never see a post from them ever again! Often, I get messages from users, and I’m sure that the moderators do - about people having disagreements. Nor myself or the Moderators have time to read through every post to see who is right or wrong, so please use the friend/foe button

Legal issues-

Every once in a while, I get people threatening to sue me, because of X reason. It really is annoying and just goes to show how utterly pathetic some people are! The forum is free, it is run by volunteers who have been good enough to help out by answering the original posters question, and because they don’t like the answer they turn nasty!

“Free forums”

Whilst I have nothing at all against free forums (forums that are on a subdomain of another forum), I would not waste my time posting in any of them, as they are likely to end up disappearing in a few months’ time. There was a plumber on here a few years back, who set one of these forums up, and I’ve just checked now and the whole forum has been deleted.
I’ll do everything I can to keep this forum open, it has been up and running since 2004 and I have no intention of ever closing it down. Forum members will come and go, but that is part and parcel to how forums work! I don’t spend enough time in the forum, but I’m always bust doing things in the background!

Huge thanks go out to all of the moderators and the forum regulars, as you really do make the forum what it is

Someone-Else · Post by **Someone-Else** » Sat Jul 02, 2022 12:37 pm

I have always said that folk do not appreciate how much work and effort there is in running a forum, well done sir.

bitzz · Post by **bitzz** » Sat Jul 02, 2022 1:25 pm

Puma wrote: ↑Fri Jul 01, 2022 7:29 am Thanks Theo, I should have probably mentioned that Wayners who was a regular poster got in touch to say the same thing - the system went down whilst Tim was away. It is looking like a permanent failure at the moment so Wayne has set up <span class="skimlinks-unlinked">https://pro-painters.freeforums.net</span> Thanks again.

Tim is indeed away and aware of the problem, this has been raised with the hosting company, but, they seem to be be very slow in resolving it.

Puma · Post by **Puma** » Mon Jul 04, 2022 9:54 am

ultimatehandyman wrote: ↑Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:22 am often people have no idea of just what is involved

I must say I was fairly clueless as to most of those issues, especially the server cost.

Desmondo15 · Post by **Desmondo15** » Thu Jul 14, 2022 4:08 pm

That’s gonna put a dent in Benjamin Moore’s pocket.

Puma · Post by **Puma** » Thu Jul 14, 2022 8:34 pm

waterbased · Post by **waterbased** » Sun Jul 31, 2022 6:00 am

Hi Puma I was wondering the same :dunno:

Puma · Post by **Puma** » Thu Sep 22, 2022 3:24 pm

Late reply, but for anyone looking this is a nice forum to drop in to, and Wayners has set up a new forum https://pro-painters.freeforums.net for the old Painters Pitstop regulars. Painters Pitstop is now gone alas.