TOCH Down :(

[leonventer]

Ruy,

Thanks very much for all your efforts. It's great to have access to TOCH again!

Your site has been operating reliably for two decades, which is a phenomenal achievement. It's a big relief to know that vBulletin supports direct migration from version 3.7.2 to version 6. I'm hoping that the software upgrade will go smoothly and that the increase in database size won't cause any issues.

However, on the off-chance that things do go badly, I'd just like to offer you and everyone else some reassurance and peace of mind: I made a complete archive of TOCH (i.e. all forums, sub-forums, threads and posts) at the end of January, and I'm currently busy doing another download. My scraper makes a page request every 5 seconds so as not to overload the server, and therefore takes about a week to traverse the entire site. If TOCH should ever go down permanently, I'll make the archive available on a website that I'm working on. The site will also include an archive of the original incarnation of TOCH (1998-2004), as well as other Luftwaffe-related reference data.

Please let me know if you have any concerns or questions.

Best regards,
Leon Venter

p.s. Like many others have offered, I'd gladly contribute to the cost of running TOCH.