Indeed, above all: Take your time! If I know anything about computing, it's that anything that gets released prematurely ends up in massive failure. So.. No deadlines there at all!

Are you planning on making a translation of the current database to the new? Or are we going to start anew completely?

Take Microsoft for example. I really like them, but they rush to get their products out first, and theres tons of bugs and crap and terrible things going wrong with their products!

I think that the best thing to do is this:

Start clean.  (Stipulations to follow.)  This will be a great opportunity to have all unused user accounts cleaned out.  Additionally, there's not much of a reason to bring EVERY thread and post over.  90% of our posts likely are never looked at again after a month.

However, people will surely want to have some of their work transplanted over to the new site, which is fine.  I would like to make a tool that people can access from anywhere on the site for the first several months.  A user who comes to the new site can opt to select songs that they want to bring over (and possibly the comments with it) to the new site.  The transplanted data will be a little broken, because there's no guarantee that the users who commented on the song will even have user accounts on the new site.  That'll be okay though.  Their info will still show up as the author of the post, but they will not be a "user" per se.

So, yes, start clean, but allow for migration of some data.  For instance, I think that most of the threads in the "Lessons" section are great candidates.

Do we have email or ways to contact these people.. I form letter sent out to all user would be a good idea. If they don't respond, or the email is not right then so be it bandamp did it''s best.. plus maybe a pm in bandamp too.

that would be a lot of emails...

It might help us to get the community going again, to rekindle the excitement of old members, but I still don't want to migrate data until they've asked for it.

Sending them a PM in bandamp is a near-useless measure, in my opinion.  If they don't sign into bandamp, then they'll never know they've got a PM waiting for them.

Even though the tool I propose would be on every page for a month, it'll ALWAYS be available to a member who comes back in 5 years from now.  I just want to heavily advertise it for a solid month or two, so that everybody knows what is up.

Yes, but there is a mass email function somewhere. The BandAMP newsletter, which we had at some point, worked that way. So there is a way to mass email all the members at once with the proper announcement although I don't have access to it myself.

Wait...for the new site we have to create new accounts?
I dont want anyone taking my name (TheKunadiun)

I know id want all of my songs/comments moved over (or at least most of them)

And there are some real classic songs on here that we just cant loose.

Which is exactly what I was expecting.  On the other hand, I don't want ALL of my stuff brought over, and I certainly don't need every thread I've ever started.

Once I can get the migration process down, we can have people still use the old site, and then have their songs migrated over in the background.  That way when we make the switch, it'll already be taken care of.

Despite the hassle for signing up again, it'll be for the best, in the end.

Actually, several of you already have accounts on the new one, because I made accounts with your usernames for the sake of testing.  Some of you have your usernames guaranteed, including

TheKunadiun, Marino, TritonKeyboarder, Flyer7477, PorcelainDoll, and a few others...

Anybody can change their username, too.  I won't force you into keeping the same username.  And if you want to change your username, but keep old songs, we can do that too.

Awesome my username is guaranteed.
We will be able to change our passwords from whatever your using to test the accounts right?

Yeah that way when u make the switch everything will be super smooth. I think its gonna transit very easily.

Are we still gonna use www.bandamp.com or how is that gonna work?

Yes, I imagine the domain wouldn't change.  We should just stick with www.BandAMP.com

passwords will be changeable whenever you feel like it. right now I think everybody's password is just "a"   Easy to type for testing logins!  I'll come up with a random password for everyone though, and email it to you when it comes time for that.

awesome sounds good!

About the mass mail function, was it not sending out mail at such a rate that the bandamp server was (nearly?) marked as a spammer ?

I could see that happening...

When the time is right, I could see us using the newsletter emailer for this.  It would certainly be news-worthy.

Update:  currently working on the topic/post text box.  I'm trying to put in a nice little set of buttons that we can use to help give people better access to the bbCode.

Yes, it had gone out of control... We were receiving a bunch of empty newletters every day! Must have scared off a couple people even.. But atleast the function is there, and it works..