This has been a trying year for the website. I've had to deal with a litany of issues related to the site's coding, as well as from my (now former) web host.
What happened was that the web hosting service I was using, Jumpline, was purchased by another company. They planned to move Handgunhunt to a new server as part of the buyout. Jumpline transferring the site to a new server in February was what broke it the first time, but I assumed we'd be fine because we'd updated the PHP forum software it was running on. Everything was still functioning well more than a month after I received the notice email. It appeared as if the switch had gone successfully, but then the site broke terribly out of nowhere on July 20th. I don't mean slightly, as in the previous case, where our formatting and entire site compatibility were jeopardized. No, we're talking about full-fledged server backend difficulties. Jumpline was of little assistance, to the point where even my tech guy became frustrated dealing with them and advised me to look for a new web host. The terminal on my account where I could download a backup of the site's data wasn't even working, and the new company drastically reduced the storage I'd previously been allocated, so we had to erase a large number of previous backups before we could even download the most recent one. The backup file then took a week to unpack on our PC for some reason. Furthermore, we've both been busy at work with some of the most important projects our company has had to deal with, which has limited the amount of time we've been able to work on the site.
The main problem we'd been attempting to resolve since the site's relaunch in April was that the Bragging Board was broken. Photopost, the software that runs it, has been completely abandoned by the developer. We still have all of the pictures from the Bragging Board saved; it's just that we're still trying to figure out a way to convert the entire gallery in such way that it preserves user data and uploads. Even before this latest disaster, we'd been working on rebuilding the site to adhere to modern browsers while retaining the "feel" of the former site's forums. We were making certain that everything worked well before proceeding, and we intended to notify everyone about the modifications before they were implemented. After all, if the forums - the reason everyone visits the site - are running properly, why risk them if we weren't 100% confident? Unfortunately, this ordeal has forced us to proceed with the renovation. Our current strategy is to divide the site's primary components (forums, photo gallery, articles, etc.) into separate sections and fix them one at a time, beginning with the forum. The renovated forums are now operational.
I realize the rest of the site looks a lot different than it did previously, but I tried to make the forums look as similar to before as possible. Despite the visual differences, t hey still function exactly the same. Furthermore, all posts made previous to July 20th, extending back to 2003, are still available.
I appreciate those who didn't forget about the site despite its recent troubles, and hopefully I can make the site better than it was before.
-Chance