one of the reasons i've decided to stay on is that as of this week, the invisonfree/IPS, Inc. folks (who host our board for free on their servers) have finally made available their new software (they've been promising this for almost a year) and are at long last starting the transitions of old boards to the new hosting software. if anyone wants to read up on it, go here.

i'm not certain that transitioning will be a good thing yet - there's some talk about not being able to transfer the skins created (i.e., the orange and black with the customized buttons and so on), and that would be a deal-killer for me. because of that and other reasons, i'm not yet well-versed in the "features" (you know, bugs) versus the benefits.

i have the opportunity to create a free test board, to see how it looks and how things go. they also have a fairly active forum for board owners, and i'll be reading up on how others' transitions are progressing, and what difficulties they encounter and so on, prior to taking the plunge myself.

i'll keep you posted here. it may still be months before this happens, given what i've read so far, but maybe not. so i'll keep you posted.

just an update on what i've learned recently.

it is true that there is no transfer of the skins to the new board. however, the SW developers are promising that a "converter" is being worked on. i think they realize how many people were going to balk at moving over, because it was really, really tedious to get the skin here to look right using their CSS style sheet template. you may notice that there is a blue up-arrow here and there -- that's because try as i might, i was unable to locate that one line in the template that could be replaced with my orange up-arrow. trying to match their abbreviations to various portions of each of the different page types was really agonizing. fun, sure, but do i want to go through that again any time soon? ;)

the other thing i've learned here recently is that the new software eliminates the ability to use HTML within posts. i could probably learn to live without it based on their claims of how much more robust their tags are - i.e., what we now have are things like [IMG] and [I] and [CODE] and so on -- they are providing far more numerous options in the new software.

the hangup with that is that any posts that were here using HTML will no longer be recognized as such. while i'm trying to repopulate the board with all of the old Born Today posts, many of those would no longer be recognizable. don't think i want to go in and change em around, either.

so for now, i'm going to sit tight. i think we've got a good thing here as is, and i've gotten much more adept at using the substitute Google Search feature to look for posts by a particular member, or posts about a particular topic, or both.

in the meantime, i'll keep reading their support forum to see what's happening. if i learn anything new that changes my mind on this, another post will follow. :study2: