Grateful he's still out there working on this website... That's way more than seemed like was going to happen in recent weeks.
If Danny decides to throw in the towel, maybe someone could take over? Where is the server hosted? Cloud base or at his home/workplace? Cloud base would make it easier to transfer ownership but even if it's physical, there are ways to transfer the data to a new owner.
Yea... Many of us have made that offer. But Danny runs an IT company in Florida so his problem is being too much of a resource to too many, not a lack of resources to keep the site running, just a lack of time to get the work done. And I think the fact that he spent the better part of the holiday weekend working on the site that he's committed to keeping it going and has no interest in selling or gifting the site to the community.
Lol, back in the 80s, I wrote a BBS program in C that I ran on my Atari ST through a 1200 baud modem. Those were the days
$0.02 - [ UNPOPULAR ? ] OPINION: I like this forum as much as anyone, but man, some of you in here are impatient and needy. I can't believe some of the stuff I read in this thread. Leave the damn owner of this forum the hell alone if he doesn't respond. He has no obligation to answer or reply to any of you and your questions / proposals / etc. The fact there was discussion of trying to reach him in person or via LinkedIn or however you think "best" is annoying in the best possible context and stalker-ish / illegal in the worst context. If everyone here has such strong opinions and skills of your own to offer, start your own forums, build out the infrastructure, and host it all yourself. Otherwise, be thankful this site is still live, even if partially broken, or even if it were to become non-functional and serve strictly as an archive. The nerve of some people...smh. /rant
Some of us have alot invested in this community and would experience a significant set back in our day to day workflow without it. And you and others coming on here and saying that the owner of the website can do whatever he wants is totally obvious to the point of not being relevent. The point is, if he shut it down or let it crash from lack of maintenance that would be an injustice to all who have put decades of work into helping people fix their Prius. To say we're being rude to respectfully communicate our concerns is oblivious of what's at stake/how much we value this community, especially when there's people who made clear they would pay a large amount of money to keep this site going. And that's because you can't just start a new forum with 20 years of large scale participation at a million views a month. As in there's more than a dozen online forums for hybrid cars and all of them combined doesn't have the same value as this one. And if you want to beat people up with the typical capitalist rhetoric of individual ownership is the only thing that matters and the community doesn't, you're part of what's wrong with our society.
Let's all take a deep breath and relax. I've been here since 2006, although I haven't been too active the last few years. Even back in the early days, Danny didn't post a lot, and rarely responded to questions posed to him. But he's kept the site running since 2003, and it's still the most active Prius forum with a lot of history. I wouldn't get too alarmed.
I saw a "migration in progress, please check back later" page for a couple hours, and now it seems ... kinda snappy. Fingers crossed....
Update posted here: https://priuschat.com/threads/november-2023-server-migration-notes.245293/ I included a little bit of a note/explanation that I owed to the community.