I just came across this thread today and would like to offer some explanation and responses to posts in this thread regarding the death and resurrection of the PerlGuru forums:

• We had carefully considered various forum scripts, and rejected them for one reason or another. For example:
  • We had used IkonBoard on a different site until it was hacked.
  • We know several people whose YaBB was hacked.
  • We already owned the commercial version of vBulletin, which we implemented on the site in 12/00. At the time, it was the only program we were aware of that had an Ultimate Bulletin Board (our original forum) import script. Immediately after implementation, even though it was faster (MySQL) and slicker than the old UBB (flat-file), there was an overwhelming cry of outrage: "why PHP on a Perl site?!?!", so we kept looking. I contacted Rick Baker (author of WWWThreads) and while there wasn't an import facility at the time, one was in the making. Rick was very helpful and took care of the import for us and PerlGuru returned to being run on Perl.
  • We have a relatively demanding user-base and relatively high standards and requirements ourselves -- we did not want to install just any program.
  • WWWThreads was a nice forum, and was satisfying almost all of our needs ... until ... the site was moved to another server and all programs except WWWThreads continued to work. The new owners of WWWThreads were phasing out the Perl version of the forum in favor of PHP; their support forum notes "Infopop is not providing technical support or continuing to develop the UBBThreads Perl version. This forum is for reporting/fixing bugs only.". Annual support contracts were available, but it didn't make a lot of sense to purchase support for a product that we had already paid for and that was destined for obsolescence.
• As far as we know, InfoPop is a fine company. However, what we had was a product they didn't want to make or support any more. Maybe we could have eventually made it work without them, but at some point you have to cut your losses and move on. The PerlGuru forums were down because the forum program we had didn't work, we couldn't get it to work, and we couldn't get any help to make it work -- that's not a judgment, it's a statement of fact.
• At the time, it was WWWThreads or nothing simply because we did not want to lose the existing 13,000+ posts, and because we didn't want to sacrifice the speed and features we'd become accustomed to. We could have put up any forum and started from scratch with 0 posts, which probably have resulted in 0 value and 0 users -- that seemed like a waste of time and effort, both on our part and on the part of those who have spent their own countless hours posting questions and helping others in the forums.
• We've been aware of Gossamer Forum for some time, but did not realize that there was an import facility until the PerlWhirl a few weeks ago, where Alex and Scott enlightened me.

We've probably spent over 1000 dollars and countless hours purchasing, installing, importing (or trying to import), upgrading, reinstalling, reimporting, maintaining, participating in ... the PerlGuru forums. The idea that we "can't be bothered" to keep this forum running is simply misguided and not based on reality.

As soon as we discovered that Gossamer Forums was an option, we made the decision to purchase Gossamer Forums. We have a tremendous amount of respect for the Gossamer Threads folks and they lived up to their reputation by bending over backwards to help us with the import of the existing data. They deserve all the gratitude and praise that we can send their way.

Best regards,

Jasmine Merced
PerlGuru.com

P.S. I'm working on the color scheme