Hmm science forum.  Should a post like is Pluto a planet be on the dueling boards or in the science section?

haha

From what I know, migrating the content is only possible to vBulletin 4.x (not 5.x) Even after this, migration will cause of a lot of issues with links to internal content (posts, images, etc.) in addition to the typical migration issues. There's usually a need to run scripts and manually tweak things to fix issues and an entire process which requires formal testing to make sure there is nothing screwed up. Don't want to deal with that.

CS is currently running on fairly premium infrastructure which is fast and responsive. The downside is that space and bandwidth is capped and we are reaching these limits, and the service isn't turnkey. I have to deal myself with occasional database cleanup and I don't have resources where I can submit tickets were I can get little things done.

It's possible to stay on this platform, but I would need SMF experts on retainer to maintain this site and also expand on its functionality. With the money raised, it would certainly be possible to do that. I hear people complain about the shitty SMF forum software and cosmetics, so I figured I'd move on to a full turnkey solution.

Regardless of whether it's migrated to the new forum or kept separate, I think it's vital to keep the old content available. Most of the major headphones have already been measured and discussed here, so it could be decades before the new forum has more content than this.

Is it possible to archive what's available here permanently in some shape or form? It doesn't have to be migrated to a new system as long as it could be preserved, right? And later on for new topics they can reference this archived material.

Gutting it and saving a static copy sounds like a good solution.

The idea is to run keep a copy of this current website running on a lower performance server that I will run from a home business class Internet connection. The legacy content can be running on the same SMF forum software or served via web server from a static copy extracted from here. There are +/-'s associated with each method and I will be consulting someone on the best approach.

Nothing will be lost, just that old content will be on the old server.

Also, some old content will be slowly migrated. The measurements will definitely be moved over for the sake of completeness. Good quality popular content will be rewritten into a digest format and also moved over.