Having been on four past servers this Café has grown! I personally have never seen any magic related board grow at this rate. Thanks for the link to help donate to the upgrade costs.

I think every dollar will help.

Thanks Randy. You're right, every dollar helps for the upgrade. We'll still be paying more monthly for the new server though, and a few dollars here and there will help with that as well. Of course, the monthly fees aren't anywhere near what the setup fee is.

I sent an order this morning for the new server to be built and expect it should be up and running in about a week. Once ready we'll make the decision of when to transfer all the files. There is a lot of data here, so it could take a while to get everything transferred and properly configured. But, of course, we'll try to make the downtime as short as possible.

Is there going to be a temp forum like we had last time?

I sent you my donation. I am only sorry I couldn't have sent more.

Doug Byrd

Yeah, we can do that.

The temporary forum we had last time turned out to be ridiculously fun...I'm glad to here there "can" be another one.

Nick Fox

Oh yeah, since nothing there was going to be saved anyway, I figured we all could let our hair down (so to speak). If I'm not mistaken, I think those old posts still exist somewhere in cyberspace.

Be careful of those "hair" comments Gene. Some of us don't have much to let down

Yeah, and even those of us who *can* grow hair (like me) keep it short anyway.

I've never had a hair problem.

THIS CONVERSATION WAS GOING ON IN ANOTHER TOPIC.



Now there's the antithesis of what I ranted about earlier. I also will be dropping dollars in there now and then even throughout the month. Give up a pizza, or six pack of beer, or anything of the sort a month and drop the dollars into a community that's been so very important to many of us. Can't recount the hours or times I've logged on for very specific information, contacted certain members for their input on something, or just general contact with like minds.

Have any magazine subscriptions soon to end that you question whether you should renew? Maybe just give up buying one - just one more 'trick of the month', some of which ultimately ends up in that junk drawer anyway?

Incidentally my junk drawer remains empty since the very review sections and comments on some of the latest magic spare me from purchase mistake. I find that information here without fail.

It remains my contact base with several members (some amateur, some pro, some famous, some unknown) and love that little 'Message' button.

I've purchased several very hard to find items right here as well. One of them, with little faith of finding the item, I listed and was found by another member who happen to have one tucked away in a closet a couple of thousand miles from me. It's now mine and in my possession. Ahhhhhh....nice story.

I'll gladly contribute my dollars here and there as I could never repay what the Café has created for us.

Oh Martha and I were chatting earlier today and she said "It's a good thing".

You have to ask yourself how much a monthly subscription to anything costs whether in printed form or online subscription. Then ask yourself how much time you spend using the Café and how much benefit you've derived from it. I'm just going to put myself on a little monthly donation.

Your day will come, Steve. Just wait.

Sure Dave...sure...

Gene and others, have you considered the idea of possibly storing some of the content (say the first 3 years of stuff) on one server while moving the newer stuff to the new server? In other words the site could be devided so that part of it is actually like an archive.

There is a LOT of information on this forum, and just like anything else, we are always concerned with reading the NEWER posts verses the older ones. Personlly I think it would make the search function more user friendly if some of the material was put aside or dumped. For example, you might search "coins through the table" and get 20 pages of info ...too much to surf through. I'd rather some of it be archived by date.

Just a few thoughts.

We used to have archives, but they all couldn't be searched at the same time and there were complaints about that. The decision was taken to make everything live again, for that reason as well as others. While your example of 20 pages of results is well taken, there are countless other searches that could normally return only a handful of matches - or none, if all content isn't searchable at the same time. Returning no matches in a limited live set of posts could discourage the member from searching the archives to find potential matches. The member may not even realize there may be matches to be found, especially for new members who may not know that older topics have been archived. We wanted searches to be easy, hence "putting everything in one basket". Once we get on the new server, I'm hopeful I'll be able to reopen the search engine just as it was before.