BWOL - How'd We Get to This Point?

[Texas-gal]

Over the past year and a half to two years, as many of you know, we have gone from the Admin. of MW (who set up this board a long time ago) being unable to deal with a mounting troll issue quickly enough for the BWOL members to be comfortable with at that time, to MW being kind enough to open up BWOL and create positions for private moderators and administrators.

It was a time of serious contemplation for MW, and you can imagine why! What would be in the future for such a wonderful forum that was growing leaps and bounds daily?

Well, when MW turned over the keys, we did a LOT of planning before making changes.

A good portion of the BWOL members participated in coming up with what they were interested in as subject headings and places to put their thoughts and ideas, their questions, their discussions, and their hearts. It took about 5 weeks of listening to everyones thoughts and ideas before getting down to business.

We did our best to make as many of the ideas fit, as we possibly could. We tweaked titles and subjects on a daily basis, until we were able to get something together that would make the majority of the few THOUSAND members here, happy.

Then we implemented the change. That change being that all of the mods took pages and pages and pages from the forums and read through each and every thread (Just how many? Who knows!) and tried to get the threads moved into their new "correct" subjects and titles. That took weeks (maybe more like 6). And, as you know, most boards just cut everything and start up fresh. But, we felt a tie to everything our members have said here over the years, and really wanted to try and save and re-distribute as many of the threads as possible. So, we did it! It was a bit more to tackle than expected!

Then around the same time as we did that, our original forum bullitin board (yabb) began to fail. What a bummer!

So, the mods, and admin (not knowing much about actual "inner workings" of these kinds of things -- we've had to teach ourselves how to be "technical"), started working on what to do, to get a more stable forum and platform.

Intuitouch pretty much taught herself what she needed to know to ask the right questions, and basically save these forums. When all was said and done, we moved to a new bullitin board (phpbb).

When things were finalized, we found there were some conversion issues, that made things hard for a few members... another "bummer".

Read on to see:
Lost Member Names, Accounts and Posts

[Texas-gal]

Lost Member Names, Accounts and Posts

BodyworkOnline.com has discovered some registered members accounts did not transfer during the move. We understand the time involved in posting your experiences and we are very sorry for the loss of your information as well as the inconvenience of losing your original account.

Please take a moment to re-register and continue sharing yourself with the many members of this forum.


A little additional information:

It appears that the software for phpbb did not differentiate between upper/lower case usernames. We believe that in the transition, members whose names used a capital letter to differentiate themselves from other members, have been seen as duplication and thus deleted by the software. Though we can't say with 100% certainty that is what happened.

What we do know, is that because it happened during the conversion we haven't figured out a way to get the lost member accounts back.

It is an unfortunate circumstance to lose all of these posts and wonderful information, but, if the frustration forces you to decide not to re-register with BWO, and go to another online community, something to consider is you will be starting anew there as well.

We began having trouble with the old forum, with members being lost and members unable to access their accounts. There were about six members that we know of who had this difficulty.

In trying to rebuild lost forums before we moved, there was plenty of information that was riddled with errors and largely unuseable. However, we still went through several attempts to recapture lost material. There were a few more accounts lost during this process.

We were hoping in the transfer to phpbb, that all those members who were having trouble would either magically reappear here or at least be able to re-register their original username.

After moving to phpbb and finding this was not the case, the infrastructure was reset and again we tried to get the old names back. Amazingly, we have managed to get several people back into their accounts who had been unable to log in on the Yabb board.

Unfortunately, the conversion to this new board has created problems for several registered users who weren't having trouble before we moved.

We truly do not know why some member names transferred and others did not. Our best guess is it has to do with upper/lower case recognition. Unfortunately, we are limited as to what we can do about that. If you are still registered but are unable to access your account, please email BWOL: <bodyworkonline @ gmail . com> and we will do our best to get you back into your account. If, you find that you are no longer registered, you will need to re-register and start over on your post counts (((sorry))).

[Texas-gal]

... All of this is written to say, for almost two years now, we (Admin. and Mods.) as a group have been working (pretty much) daily on getting these boards back to a place where we too can come read and really "enjoy" them (instead of just coming here to work).

We've now made 2 more major accomplishments to the boards!

You can read about them below:

[Texas-gal]

Opportunites Section - clean up done.

I (Masthera) am happy to say that the sections in Opportunities are now currently up to date.

As we all know, since the move, many things have needed some updating.

I have updated all announcements in this section.
Changed all post titles to go along with the directions for each section
I have deleted all posts over 9 months old.

Please help the moderators and post appropriatly in each section.

1. In the Subject Line -

* Put the City & State of the opportunity FIRST.
* Follow up with any additional information.

2. In the Message Body -

* Make sure to leave all information that someone may need in order to follow up on the opportunity. This may include your business name, address, phone number, fax number, e-mail and/or website address --- along with any other specific information.

3. Posts will expire after 9 months.

This brings BWOL's clean-up one step closer to being completed.

[Texas-gal]

Forums - Cleaning is completed!

Hi All,

I am very pleased to announce that I have just finished cleaning up the last forum! With Masthera's help, all of the forums have also been proofed.

• We have deleted any small avatar boxes that still had a red "x" in them
• Deleted any avatars that were too big (therefore pushing text off the page)
• Fixed broken quotes
• Corrected any old yabb links or sent the author of the post information that it is "broken", so thay can correct it in order to link within the new phpbb forums
• Deleted <br>'s in quotes and texts
• Moved any lingering posts that should have been in a different area

If you, the membership of BWOL find a thread or post that has one of these above mentioned problems associated with it, please let the moderator of that forum know. They will be happy to take care of it.

Thanks so much for sticking with us through all of this!

~Texas-gal~

[Texas-gal]

Please keep an eye out for a few final fixes and upgrades as they come along!

Thanks for participating in BWOL.