Have you ever had to restart a forum? If you have, what was the reason for doing so?
I had to (kind of) restart mine two years ago. It had existed for 20 years and the former owner had lost interest ages ago. So he let the forum running but stopped maintaining it - the last update of the forum software was made about 2004. It was clear that one day the thing would implode, either through hackers or through a PHP update of the provider. So already many years ago a small cohort of intense users tried to convince the owner to hand the forum over to someone else. In theory he was willing to, but the emotional journey took years and before it came into practice one day the forum was gone out of the blue due to a technical breakdown. The owner could not be reached, so nobody knows what happened and as he was the only one having access to the hosting and the forum backend there were no backups.
As many attempts to reach him failed after 6 months a small cohort of the former forum users did a fresh start from scratch with a new forum software under a slightly different domain name.
As some of the former useres got to know each other over the years we had a small, uncomprehensive network and list of former users and bridged the gap until the final restart using Slack. Far from perfect, but it did the job letting us keep in touch.
Six months after the crash we opened the new forum, had 40 users on the first day (from the cohort of old forum users) and it has been growing ever since. Today, 2 years later, we have about 1400 members, more than double than the old forum ever achieved in 20 years. And are growing every month stable at a rate of 60-90 users/month. Many former users found the new forum over time, and even more new users joined.
It is sad having lost the history but in the end a fresh start saved a lot of hassle regarding importing etc. and, together with the new forum software and the learnings from the former forum, enabled a new structure, a somewhat more grown up concept and obviously a lot of features that the old forum was missing (starting with very basic ones like the possibility to post pictures that are not just hotlinked or SSL
).
I have become a forum admin (which was never my intention) and learned, that this takes considerable amounts of my time. Especially until now, as the forum is still actively developed further in many areas. And there was a steep learning curve in both, forum management/moderation as well as with XenForo itself and it's eco system. We are slowly achieving a more or less stable state in terms of features and now the next "fun-part" will be upgrading to 2.3 some time in the next months.
As this is non commercial, no ads, no income but all about the community there is no stress in regards of generating revenue - it is just a hobby.
Automate those backups so you never have to think about it. Store those backups in multiple locations so you don't lose the backups. Test your backups to validate your backup and restore processes actually work.
From a concept point of view I fully agree with you. But many people lack awareness and/or abilities, many shared hosting accounts do not make it easy and the hosters barely mention the topic or give helpful advice. XF as a software has a huge gap here in not offering a built-in backup solution and the only addon for XF backups does not work with XF2.2 in combination with PHP8, so cannot be used by possibly the current majority of the XF users even if they would like to use it. If you know what you are doing and have ssh-access to your server/webspace it is not too much rocket science to write a couple of lines of shell-script and add them as a cronjob - but probably only a fraction of the users has the knowledge and/or possibility to do so. In my eyes XF is really lacking in regards of backups.
