Hi everyone, TPG is back!
After the site went offline a few years ago, I have been wondering what to do about the forum. I did not want to lose all the discussions, there is some amazing content and stories, plus of course all the reports from our investigations and those of the other groups we worked with. This year, in November, the domain hosting came to an end, so I downloaded the entire content and sat pondering what to do, whether to just archive everything on my server, or to pay a company to convert all the data from the decade old Snitz Forum to something more up to date what would work with WordPress.
After a few weeks of pondering, I decided to get the work done, a company in America seemed to be the one everyone recommended. After a few emails and some negotiations, we agreed a price and time frame to get the work done. I gave them access to the backend of TPG and to make easier I bought and configured the .co.uk domain. Three days later. we had a forum in wpForo, running on WordPress. It looked nice, but of course needed configuring. Once that was done I had to redo all the graphics for the site, the old headers etc, were too small for modern screens (only 640×33). I am still editing and re-touching the headers and logos but I am very happy with how things look for now.
All this work has of course incurred quite a lot of expense, if you would like to contribute towards the site and future hosting, please get in touch on the Forum, any help would me massively appreciated. Thank you.
While recreating all the graphics, the biggest hurdle was the video on the homepage of the original site, this was made in a program that no longer exists, so I had to get a program that is 10 years old. Once I got it, I was lucky enough to find all the original files and settings on my NAS for the original video, I just had to recreate the images etc, again due to the originals being too small. Once I had the program working and the new intro done, I used Action! to record the screen as the program only exports to macromedia flash (.swf) which is now obsolete.
After all the work of doing the opening intro, I am unsure if I will actually use it as it does not fit in with the homepage, but I may change that in the future 🙂
I hope you all enjoy revisiting the forum and we look forward to seeing new posts from new members. It would be great of the forum gets the attention it once did, then, all my hard work will be worthwhile 🙂
See you in the forums…..
Steve