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May 29, 2001

SitePowerUp Message Service Closing

Many of us use the SitePowerUp message service system, which has unfortunately been unavailable for the past few days. Sometime after the boards came back up today, the following message appeared (and continues to be seen there, even now) at the top of all SitePowerUp boards:
I regret to inform you that SitePowerUP.com and its services will be shutting down permanently on June 1, 2001. The only exception to this is email. Users who have @sitepowerup.com accounts are welcome to keep them. Since 1997 we have provided services for over 50,000 web sites and have logged almost a half billion pageviews from our users. Those of you with paid service will be refunded a prorated percentage of your current payment after the first week of June.

Jim Townsend  aka  Vor the Admin
Lum the mad, of his site of the same name, also reporting this story, had the following suggestions for those soon-to-be-ex-SitePowerUp users:
As a service to those in the MMO community hit by this move, here are some providers of free message board services.If you host your own web server, you can also set up your own message board. This has the advantage of not inflicting annoying pop-up ad banners and such on your users. However they can be a drain on your web server and require some (in some cases quite a bit of) knowledge in setting up web applications. Novices are recommended to start with Ultimate BB as that system has a simple step-by-step tutorial and works with almost every web server. In repeated (*sigh*) testing we've found that WWWThreads holds up the best under high-stress conditions.
  • Ultimate BB ($249, requires Perl on web server)
  • WWWThreads ($100, requires Perl or PHP and MySQL on web server)
  • VBulletin ($85, requires PHP and MySQL on web server)
  • Snitz Forums (free, requires NT web server and Access or MS-SQL)
Please feel free to use the Freeborn Press message board, here, to coordinate your message forum changes, and don't forget to check in at the news pages of your favorite groups on their own impending changes.

Posted by Keith at May 29, 2001 2:33 PM

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