Work
Some of what we have done.
Real clients, named with their permission, and every one of them still online. Follow the links and check. Two of these relationships started in 2010.
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WindowCleaner.com
sixteen years, since 2010. vBulletin 3 through to Discourse.
Mostly maintenance and development of their community forums, carried across every platform generation along the way: from vBulletin 3 up to the Discourse installations running WCR and Pressurewashingresource.com today.
For a long stretch we also built custom plugins for their Magento store. They later moved that store to Shopify, a platform we had no stake in, and the relationship carried on across the move.
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PracticalMachinist.com
More than ten years.
One of the larger metalworking and manufacturing communities online, looked after continuously for over a decade.
A decade of maintenance is server moves, operating system upgrades, PHP version jumps, forum software upgrades, backup verification, spam and abuse handling, performance work as the archive grows, and the incidents that never became outages because somebody was watching.
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PropertyTalk.com
More than a decade, vBulletin 3.8 through to current.
A New Zealand property community, maintained for over ten years and carried from vBulletin 3.8 up through to current vBulletin releases.
The same starting point as WindowCleaner, and a different destination. WindowCleaner had reasons to move to Discourse. PropertyTalk had reasons to stay on vBulletin, so they stayed.
We also advise them on their other properties, which is usually what a long relationship turns into.
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GT40s.com
sixteen years, since 2010, and never once recovered.
The main site of the group is the one that has never needed rescuing, because it has been maintained without interruption the whole time.
It began with vBulletin styling, upgrades and Linux administration, and it has not stopped since.
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The GT40s group
Acquired boards, obsolete software, and databases split apart by earlier disasters.
GT40s.com is the group's main site. Its other properties, improvedtouring.com and prodracing.com among them, were acquired from previous owners: running obsolete phpBB, and split across several separate databases as the result of past disasters.
We wrote custom scripts to merge those databases back together and resolve the inconsistencies between them, then moved the boards onto XenForo.
They run today as single, coherent communities with their history intact.
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WhiteBlaze and HammockForums
Recovery of two legacy forum communities from what looked like total loss.
A root-level server compromise destroyed the live databases. The source drive appeared to be empty.
We rebuilt both communities from forensic disk images, raw data carving, filesystem metadata, historical backups, and custom reconstruction tools written for the job. Millions of records came back: users, threads, posts, attachments, galleries, blogs, subscriptions, and the data belonging to custom applications the boards had accumulated.
The restored sites were validated before going near production, put behind Cloudflare, then given a backup system writing to more than one location.
What initially appeared to be a total loss became two functioning, searchable communities with decades of history preserved.
Work we cannot name
Some clients prefer not to be listed, and we respect that without exception. Among them is one of Singapore's largest online communities, which we mention only to give a sense of the scale we are comfortable operating at.
If you need references before committing to something significant, ask — we can usually arrange an introduction.
Have something difficult?
Tell us what you are dealing with. You do not need to know exactly what is wrong before getting in touch.