I suggest moving the forum to Reddit. You can make it a restricted sub, it’s a modern platform, costing nothing to host. The only reason to maintain this instance is the history, it would be fantastic to migrate to Reddit but that’s probably too much effort for something like this.
I have no interest in being involved in a reddit forum. I agree with Seriati that a forum away from the ornery.org url isn't appealing.
You may not be aware but the move to this forum software was used as an opportunity for a purge. There were quite a few active posters that were not allowed to make a new account here.
This is completely made up. I worked hard to get as many people to the new forums as possible. I knew that the transition was going to be a point of friction, so I hand-registered dozens of accounts. If we could have stayed on the old software I would have preferred that, but it was failing. We lost some casual posters. I didn't want to lose them, and I have never and continue to have no interest in excluding people for ideological reasons. As moderator, my rule has been very clear and consistent: be civil, don't attack one another, and you are welcome to participate.
So the heads up is appreciated as I'll go back and save some posts at least. If there was a way to just zip the whole forum and let people download it that would be cool. How much memory would that take up and is something like that feasible?
Not easily. The forum is stored in a database, not in flat files. Tools like curl or wget can be used by someone with some technical background.
My mind isn't made up yet regarding preserving the forums. It would take me about 10-20 hours of work, I think, and coordination with the current system admin. I already have and pay for the web space, so money's not an issue. I don't mind paying the $10 a year or whatever it is to park the domain. If I were to make the transition, I would continue to run it exactly how things have been run since I've been mod.
I already have this software running on my server for a play-by-post D&D game, and it's pretty easy to setup. If I didn't have a 6-month old at home and overflowing work from both my jobs, I'd definitely do the transition. Given my busy schedule and the limited value to a transition for everyone, I'm not sure it's worth the effort. I've spent the last week or two trying to convince myself to find the time to do it.
I am not sure a new hosting arrangement will be all that successful. It's inevitable that you'll lose some of the posters, and the site is already critically low on active posters as it is
If we were to make the transition, it would be seamless aside from a few days of downtime. The url, the existing posts, most of the front page, and the users would remain unchanged. The big difference is we'd have to remove all of OSC's content from the front page. Otherwise, things would remain unchanged for users.