OK, so who is "they" in the quote above? Is David Collison still actively managing the website in the background, making low or no cost changes as may be required to keep it somewhat functional? Since none of us are paying him for the convenience of having Interchange and Classifieds, it's somewhat understandable that rypn.org website upkeep might not be a personal priority for him.

/s/ Larry
Lawrence G. Lovejoy, P.E.

Hi
I will admit the website has gotten better,, over the past few days,, I site comes right up with no errors...
I had no trouble logging in,, it was quick,, and again no Errors,, from the Host.. all I can say,,,Congratulations on on all fronts... let's hope this continues... Pat from Massachusetts.
The site is working when I first started using the RYPN site,, many years, also...

Whatever happened, today was the first time I've logged on successfully on the first try in as long as I can remember.

I'm just wondering if anyone else wonders if this is normal:

Wow! I just tried to log in and it did so straight away.
First time in ages.
Many thanks to whoever got the loco fired up again!!

He obviously has more luck in logging in than some of the rest of us!

You obviously don't look at too many UK based rail Forums as said individual is what could be described as a "serial poster" on a lot of them - though he has been eliminated from one fairly recently..........

SAME HERE !!!

The Railfanning section has always been a bit of a backwater and with the site difficulties I assume most others have quit trying to post there.

However, Roger has not been daunted and frequently perseveres. Being an industrial history nerd, I enjoy his articles.

Someone posted about the trouble of the forum on Facebook and since I'm Facebook friends with Dave (I know him from soem model railroading events we attended in the past) I tagged him as a comment, perhaps he saw it and made some fixes.

I spend my time studying Polish railway history. I do recall seeing him try and slip into some Polish facebook groups a while back...

But part of the oddity is the total lack of engagement... In all these years I don't recall seeing ANY engagement with his posts... I guess he gets a lot of bot traffic directed to his site from the RYPN posts...

These forums run on phpBB, which is a known, stable, and reliable bulletin board software platform. The performance issue here is a web server problem, not a phpBB software problem. The site needs a new host.

phpBB is an older platform, and there are many others that are better and have more features. All the data stored here (text and images) could be exported out of phpBB to a SQL database. That database file could then be imported into a new site on a different server, but sill use the rypn.org domain name. But this would require the cooperation and assistance of whoever is in charge of this site now.

Today the site is once again as slow as molasses. My login took almost a full minute to get in. That is an unacceptable eternity in online time. It should take just a few seconds.

Looks like the search function has disappeared, unless you are logged in. Moving slow again at times, also.

I believe there are multiple issues. This version of phpBB that we are using here, likely 3.1, is over 10 years old. It is designed to run on PHP5, which version I don't know. The latest current version is 8.5.9 which is hundreds of updates/upgrades beyond the release of 5.5.8 released in January 2014.

So what I think we have is deprecated software running in a modern environment that no longer supports the older version's functions. Add to that, limited server space bringing the throughput to a crawl. It seems that as problems arise with functions with this BB software, those modules are removed or just stop functioning.

I've reached out to a few others about moving the site but haven't gotten anywhere. I fully expect to come here someday to be greeted by a page that says the domain name is for sale for an ungodly fee. If you've ever checked if rypn.com is available, well yes it is... for $25,000 by the same good folks that are the current domain name registrar and likely subcontract the hosting to others - a company I would never do business with.

I for one have thought this is a great idea. I think the message board would be a good service of Heritage Railway (ATTRM). But it seems all proposals stop due to the inability to contact Mr. Collision.
~Wesley

Is he alive? Can't you get some private investigator to track him down? Has anyone checked the phone book?