Denizens of BABB--

I have a major announcement for you. I hope you're sitting down.

There have been several issues lately on this board, as you are probably aware. One is with moderation. Another is adding new sections on the board for such things as spaceflight. A third involves problems with bandwidth and the ginormous size of the board's database.

All these problems are about to be solved.

Fraser Cain is the admin of The Universe Today website. This is in many ways a sister site to BA; we have similar goals of educating and exciting people about space. We also both have big boards on our sites, and many of the goals for those boards are the same as well.

So we have decided to merge our bulletin boards into one board.

See? I told you to sit down!

This merger solves many problems in one fell swoop:

1) Moderation: UT already has a moderation system in place that works. The rules there are very similar to BABB (Fraser based them on the ones here, actually). The merged board will have rules similar to what you already know. We decided we needed moderators who are from BABB as well, since they already know the ropes, so I am happy to announce that ToSeek and Wolverine have agreed to the position. They are both familiar with BABB (ToSeek being the most prolific poster by a long shot), and are level-headed enough to trust in this positions.

2) New fora: no problem! UT already has sections devoted to spaceflight. There are also fora for astrobiology, astrophotography, and astronomical equipment. The merger will preserve these, as well as BABBling and our other sections.

3) Bandwidth? Disk space? Pfah! This new forum will sit on its own server. It'll be lightning fast.

After much thought, we decided to use vBulletin for the software. This is very similar to phpBB, so most folks will have no trouble making the switch. It's easy for us to manage, and has a lot of bells and whistles I think people will like. We'll have avatars, for one. There's a built-in calendar, and lots of other trinkets. It's better configured, and less prone to security issues which have been plaguing me for years with phpBB. The support system is excellent.

Now, don't panic: All the old threads will be on the new board. Since the forum structure will be different (for example, Lunar Conspiracies will merge into Against the Mainstream) the threads will get moved around a bit, but we're making this as easy on you as we can. We're maintaining a logical structure, and finding the threads won't be hard. We have also made a test run of the merge, getting the forum categories, merging threads, and all that. Everything went fine, and we took notes. :-)

I know everyone will have lots of questions. I hope I can answer them here. There will be a FAQ for the new site that should answer a lot of these (like about post counts, emailing, etc.). I know this will be baffling to some, irritating to others, and confusing to even more. But I also think after a little while the vast majority of people will see that this is not only a good idea, it's a great one. We'll have a bigger community, more diverse, with more interesting things to say. We'll attract even more people, too, since the board itself will be bigger. But I don't think we'll lose the sense of community. Fraser and I respect that aspect of our boards very much, and will do whatever we can to maintain it.

When is this going to happen? The short answer is: Sunday, September 3. The longer answer is, we're not sure. :-) We plan on migrating the databases to the new server Saturday afternoon, and it'll take us the better part of a day to set up. We then have to tweak it, making sure everything works. We want the break in service to be as short as possible! The plan is to have it up and running Sunday, but of course I cannot promise.

During that time, I will disable BABB. Once I copy the database, it would be silly to post at BABB anyway; the new post won't get moved. Once it's up and running, I'll set up a redirect from the old board to the new one, so clicking on the BABB link or using your bookmark will take you to a page saying that we've moved, and then send you to the new board after ten seconds or so. You'll know when the new board is running: the BABB main page will say so.

For now, we don't have a good name for this new board. We've tried, too! So we are calling the the Bad Astronomy Universe Today board, or BAUT (UTBA sounded funny). A new name will be decided later. In fact, we're going to have a contest to name it! There will be several contests involved with this new board as well, which should be fun.

I know we've been through a lot lately. I really do think that this merger is going to be the best of both worlds, or, in this case, universes.

This announcement is being posted on every forum, and it will be locked so that it stays short. I will open a thread in BABBling for discussing this. I'll do what I can to answer your questions.

Thanks everyone!

-Phil, aka The BA