As is obvious now, we have sold the forum. I know just how much of a shock and surprise that is, and I’m certain that your initial thoughts when it happened are of grief, anger, sadness and even doom. But, before you let your emotions run away with you, please hear me out—there is a reason why it happened and we hope it is not a negative thing, but in the long-run we believe it is a very good thing.
In fact, I have reason to believe that instead of being a disaster, its sale ensures the long-term future and health of the forum.
First, I’ve been doing this a very long time now and I’m getting older (66) and tired. I’ve reached the point in my life where I want to actually slow down and enjoy my golden years! But, it’s very important to me that all the work I have done in the last 16 years to spread the good news of nomadic living not die out with me—I want it to go on for many years to come to bring hope and joy to as many people as it possibly can.
Here’s how selling the Forum fits into that.
When I started
cheaprvliving.com in 2005 and the forum in 2011, I did all the work myself and because I have very low technical skills and knew nothing about websites or forums I did a pretty poor job of it, as you are aware, on a regular basis it crashes and we cobble together solutions and have just barely been able to keep it running.
Recently I decided to bring in an editor and webmaster to restart, redesign and modernize the main website,
cheaprvliving.com and to do that I must update to the very latest version of PHP. While the website is built on Wordpress, Wordpress itself runs on PHP) because the forum is a subpage of
cheaprvliving.com/forums, the forum is also running on PHP and it must be updated as well.
The problem is that both the website and forum are running on very old versions of PHP because every time in the past when we went to update to the latest version, the forum crashed and would not run again until we went back to the old version of PHP.
It’s just some weird, buggy, fault of the old MyBB software that the forum is built on that will not let it work with the latest versions of PHP.
We have reached the point where we are ready to publish the redesigned and rebuilt
cheaprvliving.com, but it must be on the latest version of PHP to work properly with the latest versions of Wordpress, the Themes and Plug-ins—they all expect the latest version of PHP.
However, because the forum will not allow me to update to the latest version without crashing, the new website is dead in the water. That forces me to choose between them.
My decision to sacrifice the forum is based on the certainty that the crap software the forum is built on will ultimately breakdown and no longer work, and at the same time will hold back rebuilding the website until then.
That way we would end up without either of them. Obviously, that isn’t acceptable to me. The only option was to build a whole new forum built on good software, but I am looking for a way to do less, not to begin building a whole new forum.
The decision was made, if we couldn’t find a way to allow the forum to coexist with the modernized website, we were going to close the forum. In fact we were searching for an alternative, and couldn’t find one so the plans were in the works to close the forum.
Then, out of the blue, I got a letter from a company offering to buy the forum. We looked into the company and what they had in mind and when we were satisfied they were legit, we met with them and began discussions with them. All of us felt really good about the new company and felt like they really wanted what was best for the forum in the long run.
So we completed the sale and transfer of the forum to them. I’m certain this is the only way to continue the good works the forum is doing for so many people.
And don’t forget, if they weren’t buying it, this would be a “Why I am Closing the Forum Letter” instead!
I know this was a long letter, but I thought it was important that I told you the whole story about how we have arrived here. I want you to know that with all my heart I believe this is the very best thing for the long-term future of the forum, this is the only way it is going to keep going and keep serving people in the future.
It will require some minor sacrifices such as having a few ads—but we will all gain so much more than we will lose that eventually we will all look back and be very glad this sale happened!
