Case study · Care and Rescue
sixteen years on one board, and repair work on the ones it bought.
GT40s.com has been looked after without interruption since 2010. The other communities in the group arrived later, from other owners, in much worse condition.
Two different jobs for one client
GT40s.com is a community for people who build and race GT40 replicas. Serious enthusiasts rather than a business, which shapes everything about how the work is done.
We started in 2010 with vBulletin styling, upgrades and Linux administration. That has continued ever since, through several generations of forum software and several servers.
GT40s.com has never needed recovering. The same people have watched it throughout, and fixed small problems while they were still small.
The group's other properties tell the opposite story, because we did not have them from the start.
The boards that arrived broken
improvedtouring.com, prodracing.com and others were bought from their previous owners. They came with history attached, in both senses.
Each one arrived running obsolete phpBB. Worse, several had been through disasters under previous ownership, and the recovery from those disasters had left the content split across multiple separate databases.
A forum split across databases is harder to reassemble than it sounds. What you have is two partial forums that both believe they are complete: overlapping identifiers, users existing twice with different histories, threads whose replies live somewhere else, and no authority anywhere about which version of anything is correct.
What we did
There is no tool for this. Forum importers assume one coherent source database, and these were neither coherent nor singular.
We wrote custom scripts for each board: to merge the databases back into one, to find and resolve the contradictions between them, and to rebuild the relationships that had been broken when the content was split. Only once a board was internally consistent again could it be converted and moved onto XenForo.
The order matters. Migrating first and repairing afterwards would have carried every inconsistency into the new platform and made it permanent.
The result
The acquired boards run today as single coherent communities on current software, with their history intact. GT40s.com continues as it has since 2010.
Why both halves are on one page
The same client, over the same period, shows what continuous care prevents and what its absence costs. GT40s.com has never needed rescuing. The boards that spent years under owners who were not watching needed a great deal of it, and the repair bill landed on the person who bought them.
If you are acquiring a community, this is the work nobody quotes for in advance. Find out what state the data is in before the money moves. We are happy to look.
Buying a forum, or stuck with one?
Tell us what you have taken on. If the previous owner cannot explain how it is put together, that is usually the first clue.