MWT Bulletin Board to undergo change

(January 21, 2007) Over the next 30 to 60 days the MWT Bulletin Board will undergo a variety of changes. The changes are designed to allow continued operation of this local web community favorite. Among the many changes will be a name change to the Midwest Community Bulletin Board, a new web address, and many technical changes.

This change represents the third time since 1994 that the MWT Bulletin Board has undergone software redesign. The site, which has had more than one million posts since it was developed, continues to grow to meet user needs. Administrators of the site have noted that the site now receives over 500,000 unique page views a week.

The new Midwest Community Bulletin Board will continue to be sponsored by Midwest Tel Net but will operate on it’s own independent web server designed specifically for the bulletin board and similar features. The new database driven site will have a very similar look and feel as the old site, with some additional enhancements.

The conversion will cause some limited disruption however administrators are confident they can convert all of the existing usernames, profiles and passwords to the new site. Administrators expressed less confidence in the ability to move user inbox contents, buddy lists and other features.

Bulletin board messages will not be moved however both boards are expected to run at the same time for a short period, with the previous board being in read-only mode.

Users should prepare for these changes by copying any important information contained in their inbox to their local computer. Also, any buddy list should also be copied locally as it is uncertain whether this data can be converted. Also any posts that the user wants to retain should be copied to a local machine.

Operations on the existing board will be limited over the next several weeks to prepare for the conversion. Archives have been severely limited, HTML page markups have been turned off and many posts have been deleted to simplify the process.

During the transition process availability of the existing bulletin board will from time to time be limited and administrators ask for your patience during these brief outages.