The day we were dreading came Tuesday. ForumsForFree went out of business.

They were bought out by a new company. The new company does not allow commercial websites to place advertisements on their forums. The forums are currently down while the new parent company transfers the files.

We are faced with a very difficult decision. We can either:

A) Stay where we are and remove all ads from the forums.
or
B) Go back to our old forums.

There are pros and cons on each side of the issue.

If we remain where we are and remove the ads, we may alienate some of our advertisers and this may cause us to lose some of them. I would like to point out to them that your ads will still appear on many of the pages of NEARsports.com

If we remain where we are, none of your memberships, posts or post counts will be affected. All content will be as it was.

If we go back to our old forums, we will still be able to display advertisements on the forums. If you had an account at these forums before we moved, it is still active and ready to use.

Here's the bad news. None of the posts or post counts will be able to transfer from our current forums to our old forums. Also, if you joined the NEARsports Forums AFTER we moved to the FFF forums, you will no longer have an account. You will have to create a new account and start from the ground up.

We had a strong feeling this was coming, and we made every effort to protect ourselves, but the fact is, the old owners of FFF were incredibly uncooperative and they would not forward our files to us.

We are now working on a third option. We have been told (finally) that our back-up files will be made available to us. If we can find someone that knows how to do it, we are going to install a message board on our own server (NEARsports.com) and integrate our files into it. This option, if available, will take place anytime in the next two weeks.

Thank you for your patience, and your continued support of NEARsports.com.

I was about to ask you if this would be the break to host your own ... when you're ready to do it, contact me. I just went through all that nice stuff with my own website so I think I could be of some help, can't guarentee how much though.

Are there not other forum host? Maybe some type of pay forum that you can do all the ads you want?

What about this type of forum!

Invisionpower

Our biggest concern is preserving the posts and memberships. If we start a new forum we can't do that. We are working on this and we'll hopefully have news soon.

There are still glitches with the forums. Currently, no new members can register. Also, admins can't access the admin controls. PM's are having a hard time going through as well. I have been assured that these problems are being worked on as quickly as possible.

I would recommend using vBulletin for your forums ... but if you would rather use a free forum I would look at phpBB or Invision.

We are currently negotiating to stay exactly where we are.

And as for this weekend's sports stories...I have them and I am going to post them, but I have been sick all weekend and taking care of a sick 2 year old as well. I am going to get them all up late this afternoon.