Do you think this site will become the next main New Jersey Gun Forum? There are others out there like on FirearmsTalk where there are state forums but they are very flat with little activity.
What I miss most about the last forum is that there was a depth of information and that you could look back through that history. The community was awesome and always helping each other.
I’m hoping to bring that back. I can’t do anything about the lost information as I had nothing to do with the previous site. Though looking at Invision Community support FAQs seems that backups should have been available for the old site unless it was self hosted (in which case you do your own backups with regular testing as I plan to do.):
The pricing is a bit steep at Invision and maybe that was the downfall of the previous site that there was not enough support to pay the bill. Again, I don’t know just speculating here. Rough calculations I would figure we would need at least 70 subscribers to pay for a base Invision subscription. With the Discourse setup I’m figuring we would need 20-25 subscribers. Less than half the cost of Invision. Even as the site grows and we need more resources and services we will still need less subscriptions than an Invision setup.
Does this forum need to be on Invision if we can get 90% of the functionality out of Discourse? I’d rather use the excess funds for community events than on technology.
I agree being able to search posts back 10 or more years was convenient however if that was the downfall of the previous site then in no way is it worth it to keep a database that large.
I don’t think that was the main issue but if that was the case they could have purged the older posts that are no longer relevant to reduce the DB size.
I only half believe the story about a hard drive crash/DB corruption. Even if this were the case why 4 months? Why not bring it back blank with an oops…sorry. The admin has some culpability in this regarding backups and such and that site should not be down this long.
What’s the cap on uploads for images and or videos? Is that restricted in anyway currently?
One way to keep cost down would definitely be purging.
One suggestion would be to remove images from sales/trades after 30 days and also purge of a sale/transaction is completed?
These are just ideas being tossed around.
4MB images 8MB non-image (I can adjust these settings, types and size limitations)
Right now we have 55GB free on 80GB disk. Almost a week of backups totaling a whopping 64MB this includes 15MB of uploads so far. It will take some time and activity to give me a better idea of the storage needs but considering the limitations unless we have a thousand+ active users it’s not going to grow that fast.
Allowed File Types
By default, Discourse allows image file types (jpg, jpeg, png, gif, heic, heif, webp, and avif).
Admins can also add more file extensions to the authorized extensions and authorized extensions for staff site settings to allow other types of files, such as .pdf, .docx, .mp3, etc.
Removing all file types from the list of authorized extensions will disable uploads on your site. If you don’t want to store uploads on your site’s server, you can disable them, tell your users to only publish uploads to external sites, and then share the links to the uploads on your site.
Allowed File Sizes
The default maximum size for images is set to 4096 kB (4 MB). This limit can be adjusted by changing the max image size kb site setting based on the needs of your community.
The default maximum size for non-image uploads is set to 8192kB (8 MB). This limit can be adjusted by modifying the max attachment size kb site setting.
Removing all file types from the list of