Future of the QL Forum

[robheaton]

The QL Forum admin team has been discussing the best way to secure the future of the QL Forum and how to also protect the site in light of the new Ofcom rules, that are due to come into effect in the UK in March 2025.


Due to Ofcom bringing in changes to the UK Online Safety regulations in March, we are unable to continue running the forum in it's current form.
Several UK forums have closed down as a result of these changes, however this isn't something we want to do.
We've agreed a plan and are planning to implement the following changes;

• The web hosting will be moved out of the UK onto a server located in the USA.
• The forum domain name will be changed to theqlforum.com
• The old forum domain name theqlforum.com will be redirected to a holding page stating that the domain has changed and provide a link to continue to the new address.
• The IRC to Discord bridge will be moved to a server in the USA
• The Servers will be held in an account owned by a good friend of the QL Forum (techfury)
• The Forum admin and moderator teams will remain the same, with the addition of techfury as an admin.

Regarding other QL Related services we provide, we are ensuring the future of these too.

• The QL Homepage, which is managed & run by Dilwyn will continue to be available on the new domain.
• The QL Wiki will be available on the new domain.
• The IRC server will be kept in the USA and have the address of chat.theqlforum.com
• All forum content, posts & user accounts will be migrated and rest assured, nothing will be lost.
• Any external sites that we currently host for the QL Community will be maintained.

The final part of this change will be how the forum is funded, I've personally funded the forum since it was started and spent approx. £3800 over the last 15 years.

We are asking for the community to support the Forum via a GoFundMe Page. We need your help to raise approx. £190 a year to cover hosting and domain registration fees.
Our fundraising page is available here - https://www.gofundme.com/sinclair-ql-fo ... ting-costs

If you are able, please show your support and make a donation, there is no minumum amount and every little helps.



We are planning to move the forum on Saturday the 22nd February, starting late in the evening at 11PM UK time.
The Forum will be offline until 8AM on Sunday 23rd February.

If anyone has any questions, please reach out to us.


Thank you.

[vanpeebles]

It should fix that resources bug too!

[robheaton]

I've suspended any future donations, we have smashed our goal in a record time!
Thank you to everyone that donated, you peeps are amazing!

We have more than enough funds to continue into 2027!

[vanpeebles]

I'm really speechless at that and emotional too. Thank you!!

[techfury]

We've completed the migration to the new server. Please let me know if you run into any problems!

For the time being, all existing URLs to *.qlforum.co.uk will automatically redirect to *.theqlforum.com. Since we used a 301 redirect, this should also automatically update bookmarks, and Google search results should update in short order.