[Darth-Apple]

Proboards is one of the largest (if not the largest) free forum host on the internet. They wrote their software from the ground up, and it's actually not bad (albeit somewhat outdated), but the problem isn't the software or the size. It's the policies. 

They lock down content so tightly that it is illegal to even attempt to get your content off. Users "own" their individual content (not ordinarily a bad thing), BUT they OWN it so tightly that if an administrator ever wants to move to a different host, they, legally, have to request permission from EVERY single user that has posted, write a crawler/scraper, and get ONLY the posts for which the permission has been granted onto their new host. And there is no database export option.

It's gone a little far. Forumotion was similar back in the day, but at least they didn't have licensing gotchas that could have gotten you sued back in the day. They don't allow it, per se, but people have used them many times, so it's at least possible to move to a different host if you ever need to have it done.

Anyway, I found this recently. It's quite literally proboards. Exact same software and all, but "for businesses"

https://www.forums.net/pricing

I'm sorry, but if I have $200/month, I'm going straight to IP.Community and paying them 1/10 that amount to host on REAL paid software instead. End of story.

[Guardian]

WOW that's... embarrassing. I hope no one uses that. I've told multiple people, that despite their forums having thousands of posts on their ProBoards boards, that it will be better in the long run for them to move off of Proboards as on as possible. This just goes to prove it.

Stuff like this makes me miss IcyBoards.

[Lain]

Modify the license agreement for users who sign up (the EULA thing) that you (the administrator of the board specifically) has a limited legal ownership over all posts for the sake of migration/moving services and not owning the content directly

Should f*** 'em up.

[Darth-Apple]

Does it let you modify that? If so, you could have a "by joining proboards, you signed theirs. By posting here, you sign ours or we ban you" type of thing...

Definitely not a red flag...

ALSO I did some quick math. 1,000,000 page views a month sounds like a lot, but it's ~33,000 page views/day. That equates to 1,375 page views per hour (23/minute). Seems like a lot. But ajax requests (which happen all over the place on proboards) count too. Every single time a browser sends a request from the current page checking for more replies, or checking for new threads, or anything else, it counts as a page view. So theoretically, the majority of these page hits are likely from ajax, and you're looking at significantly fewer pages that could actually be viewed.

I'm sorry, but when $20 VPS could easily (without breaking a sweat) handle that load, I'm not paying proboards $200/month for it. They are so freakin sleazy.

[Lain]

Yeah that's absolutely nuts
It's like paying for one of those lambda services from AWS (function calls in an API) and then doing something recursive so you call the function 1000 times instead of once LMAO

[Darth-Apple]

Yeah that's absolutely nuts
It's like paying for one of those lambda services from AWS (function calls in an API) and then doing something recursive so you call the function 1000 times instead of once LMAO

That's exactly the kind of s*** they're doing too. 

[cunning]

You are missing a few forum hosting services. I have 2 for now and i don't intend to use them and they are flexible with import/export content. Have you tried a simple scheme like hosting the database outside their service?

[Darth-Apple]

On a free forum hosting service, that's impossible. They don't let you do anything outside their walled garden.

I've always used VPS hosting. Free hosting was never the ideal way to go, but there are services that are far, far better than proboards. What hosts are you aware of?