9 replies to this topic

[Josh Bond]

Karen Everest, the co-founder of e-Sword-Users.org, has graciously granted us access to the e-Sword-Users.org domain name, website, database, and content. We're going to merge the forums in one way or another, bringing back all of the old messages! Although we already have most of the old e-Sword website's downloads, we do not have the author pictures and verbose descriptions of many files. This will take a little time, but at least now we can help people trying to find the old website. We will also be able to contact the 18,000 users of the old website to tell them about the new website.

A huge thank you to Karen Everest and also to Greg of PrayerRequest.com who has been (and will be) helping me migrate this data to the IPBoard platform...

[kerstuff1]

I think this is great!

[Josh Bond]

The old message board is up at: www.e-sword-users.org. I upgraded Drupal (that website's software) to the latest, stable version, since it had not been upgraded in some time.

You cannot login, as there's no point in creating additional content there when we're moving it here. But for those of you wanting access to your old posts, this is your first chance. I'm going to TRY pull the forums and post content from the old Drupal database to this website's database so that old content can be found with this site's search and displayed within this site's forums.

Now that I can see the old forum structure, I may copy a few forum names into this one. I didn't have access to what the old site looked like when making this one.

[Josh Bond]

The old message board is up at: www.e-sword-users.org. I upgraded Drupal (that website's software) to the latest, stable version, since it had not been upgraded in some time.

You cannot login, as there's no point in creating additional content there when we're moving it here. But for those of you wanting access to your old posts, this is your first chance. I'm going to TRY pull the forums and post content from the old Drupal database to this website's database so that old content can be found with this site's search and displayed within this site's forums.

Now that I can see the old forum structure, I may copy a few forum names into this one. I didn't have access to what the old site looked like when making this one.

In the lower, right hand corner of the old site, there's a number of links to privacy policies and stuff that I might paste into this site. Should we have a doctrinal statement?
Old Doctrine statement

[Live4Jesus]

The doctrine recognizes the trinity but doesn't mention heaven or hell. See where Im going with this? I would steer clear of this mess.

The old site seems blazin fast now, except for an occasional delay and says connecting to biblesupport.com.

What's the grand plan here? Why not link up the old url to biblesupport directly instead of keeping the old site alive but in frozen form? What is the avantage of this...

[patchworkid]

HI. Very nice, just a few questions:

1. will the forums be linked to BibleSupport.com - will people have their say stay in the old site?

2. Would you like people to be converted over to BibleSupport.com from the old site?

3. Would you have all the info moved over to this site?

I am glad that you got a hold of the link because there is a lot of stuff their that can be used.

thanks
Patchworkid

[Josh Bond]

The old site seems blazin fast now, except for an occasional delay and says connecting to biblesupport.com.

There's a pause sometimes while the old site pulls data from BibleSupport.com. You'll notice, the old site now displays the recent uploads and recent content from this website. The speed is faster because I upgraded Drupal to a modern version and tweaked the settings.

What's the grand plan here? Why not link up the old url to biblesupport directly instead of keeping the old site alive but in frozen form? What is the avantage of this...

The old site had tremendous search engine backlinks (over 4,500), page rank, and credibility. I figured if I re-enabled the old site, Google would reactivate the index listings (some 30,000 pages indexed). By putting prominent links to BibleSupport.com on the old site (that Google already knows and trusts), we will boost our own search rankings and credibility in the eyes of Google (all comes back to Google). If this does not work as expected, then I would do as you suggest, forward the old domain to this website. If I had access to the old site from the beginning, then I could have directly built on that site and platform and kept the old domain name. That would be much preferred to starting a new site but we're past that fork in the road now.

[Josh Bond]

1. will the forums be linked to BibleSupport.com - will people have their say stay in the old site?

Worst case: We will have a link from these forums to the old forums. Not ideal. But thats the backup plan. The primary plan is to pull the data from the drupal database and insert it into the IPBoard database. I have some requests for help pending with those who have done this before. It's not as simple as copying from Database 1, Table A to Database 2, Table A. IPBoard is a relational database, with content from a single forum topic split over a dozen tables. I will have to diagram it on paper, and write some sql statements. Before doing all that, I'd rather be lazy and use someone else's code since I *know* others have done this.

2. Would you like people to be converted over to BibleSupport.com from the old site?

I'd like to have all 18,000 members of the old site sign up here. I've contemplated an announcement to those email addresses. Also an option is to copy the member data from the old database to BibleSupport's database. This is much easier than the forum post integration. That way people would not have to re-sign up, although re-signing up is not that big of a deal.

3. Would you have all the info moved over to this site?

Yeah, a lot of that will happen when I resolve the forum content and the members data. Some of the forum posts and tutorial-type-information (like the info on Best) can be presented here in the Tutorials section. We are free to integrate any and all data from the old website into this website. Anyone wanting to take content from the old site and make a Tutorial is welcome to do so.


Just getting the old website site ported and all the data downloaded was a huge challenge because of the size of the website, lack of ability to zip or tar the old website, and because Godaddy had shutdown the website. The problem was the old website had about 20+ gigs of data that was being stored, but not used by the website. Web hosters don't like that for a variety of reasons.

Once I downloaded (for future review) the data that Godaddy objected to and deleted it, Godaddy immediately (within 2 hours) brought the site back up. I was worried I would have to beg and plead for them to restore the website but that part was easy. Then I began the task of moving the website and all its data and downloads via FTP (instead of the desired ssh). I quickly realized I couldn't download all the data on a DSL connection. So I transferred all the data from Godaddy's server to my server at what turned out to be a very fast rate of tranfser. The old database alone was 3 gigs and exporting that took some trial and error. Wild weekend.

[Josh Bond]

We've gone from 10-20 new members a day (our running average for the week prior to e-Sword-Users.org returning) to 40+ members per day. The doubling (plus) of new members is coming from the e-Sword-Users.org website. My thanks again to Karen for helping people find this website and the e-Sword resources they're seeking.

[jonathon]

Have a QR Code for this site.

Attached Files

•  biblesupport.com.png   333bytes   9 downloads