November 9 Update:

I had to hire outside help to migrate the forum to new software. I tried on my own with the built in tools, but wasn’t successful.

Anyway, they were and the only thing(s) left for me to do before reopening it is to tweak how it looks. Almost without thinking, I went with the least complex forum plugin for WordPress – BBpress. And while simple is right up my alley, it means there is a lot of messing around to do to get a properly functioning forum. Messing around equals time, but I’m already pretty far. Here’s how it looks right now:

While the old one was closed to registration, this new one will be open to join. Existing members just need to click the “Reset Password” link and sign in with their original email address.

I still have a lot left to do, but I expect it will be ready some time later this week.
Thanks for your patience!

November 6 / 2019

Just a quick one to say that the forum is temporarily down. The reason for this was an upgrade to the php module the site runs on. As I suspected, it’s incompatible with that old forum software.

What I’m doing now is installing a native-to-WordPress forum solution and will then import from the old to the new. At this time I’m not sure if this is something I can do on my own, or whether I’ll have to get outside help.

The update to the php module was necessary and I’ve been putting it off for more than a month. The main site runs fine with the upgrade, and that was my main concern.

While activity on the forum (my own included) has tailed off over the past few months, I do want to get it back and running again on better software. I’ve also been putting off this change for more than a year, and this will give me that nudge I need to get it done.

As for current members: I’m not sure about the details yet, but chances are you’ll have to make a new password. There isn’t any way to transfer the password info from the old to the new. There will be more details soon.