Taking over a site from a dying guy...

[LucyDuke]

So here's what's up.

I work for a very niche-oriented automotive business. We're a pretty small company, and over the past few years we've developed a relationship with an independent local car club. They have a website with a forum that their community is centered around. We've had parties at our shop for them, gone on cruises with them, and so forth, we've got a couple of regular posters in their forum, that sort of thing.

The admin is dying. He's had cancer for two or three years, he was in remission for a while and just recently took a sharp turn for dead. He made an announcement that he was looking for someone to take over the site, and we were the only ones to reply. He was enthusiastic about us taking over, we've agreed to it.

The problem is that he's just about literally on his deathbed. I'm not sure precisely whether he's got a week or an hour, he may well be dead as I type. His wife called us and said she'd do whatever she can to help. I have absolutely no idea what her computer abilities are.

There's one extra consideration, which is that the site has a few corporate sponsors. They're direct sponsors, not an ad account, they've paid a fee to have their banner in rotation for some period of time. (I think it's a year.) These deals are still active, so we'll need to maintain the ads at least until they expire. I assume we'll need records of this.

How do I go about doing this?

How much of a fuss would it be to transfer the site to my own space and to transfer the domain into my name? (I've never transferred ownership before.)

What sort of information do I need? Can I make do with usernames and passwords? I imagine I need login information for the hosting company, perhaps FTP, and I'll need an admin account on the forum. Can I transfer the "root" admin privileges so that we can leave his account untouched? (It's YaBB.)

I'm not entirely sure what skills I'm going to need to maintain this site. My own have been old-school for a long time, basically just HTML with some CSS and JS. I've recently started using some PHP stuff, but I'm still just learning that. Apparently this site uses Perl: how bad could this be? I don't think I'm going to be making a whole lot of changes, but I need to at least understand what I'm working with.

(It strikes me too as ridiculous that "what happens to my website" is something one would worry about on one's deathbed, but if you've met car fanatics you can probably understand. It's a pretty tight community.)

So long story short, guy's dying, wants us to take over his site, might not be able to help at all. What do I need to do?


EDIT: If somebody trustworthy can help me out, I can share specific details if they'd be useful. Don't really wanna post that for the world to see though.

THANKS.

 

[Macha]

How much of a fuss would it be to transfer the site to my own space and to transfer the domain into my name? (I've never transferred ownership before.)

I'm not sure about transferring the domain, so you'll need someone elses help with that.

What sort of information do I need? Can I make do with usernames and passwords? I imagine I need login information for the hosting company, perhaps FTP, and I'll need an admin account on the forum. Can I transfer the "root" admin privileges so that we can leave his account untouched? (It's YaBB.)

I don't know about transferring root on YaBB. I know on phpBB, we had a lot of hassle with that. I know on CU when d.highland's account was deleted (being the root account), it caused a few technical issues down the road.

I'm not entirely sure what skills I'm going to need to maintain this site. My own have been old-school for a long time, basically just HTML with some CSS and JS. I've recently started using some PHP stuff, but I'm still just learning that. Apparently this site uses Perl: how bad could this be? I don't think I'm going to be making a whole lot of changes, but I need to at least understand what I'm working with.

For the most part, you won't need any Perl skill, as the YaBB community (http://www.yabbforum.com/community/ ) should be able to help you on any issues. Which is just as well, as Perl is not nice to newbies.

 

[Till]

Things i'd do:

1.) Post on the forum that you'll take over, and that there'll be a downtime soon.
2.) Create an account at a domain registrar, and transfer the domain. Pretty much all registrars should offer an option to transfer domains. The current owner/his wife will have to confirm via email.
3.) Wait for the domain to be transferred. Then lock the forum (if possible) and copy everything to your web host. Luckily YABB doesn't require any dedicated database programme, so you'll just have to make sure your host allows CGI, and that the folder structure remains intact. If the CGI directory is different on your host, you will have to create some symlinks.
4.) Change the domain to redirect to your host. That's easily done via the registrar's website.
5.) Create a new admin account on the forum. Dunno how that is done, i never used YaBB. Probably best to ask on the developers' forum, if it is not immediately obvious. It certainly can be done, in the worst case you'll have to edit some files.

Perl can be very bad news; it's infamous for unreadable code. You can write pretty decent code with, though (Morte on #fiftychat is written in Perl), so you'll just have to look at the code.

 

[LucyDuke]

Thanks Till.

I've started transferring the domain, I'm going to email them about the confirmation. I will ask them to create the forum admin account for me, but if for some reason that doesn't work... I suppose I'll ask the YaBB community.

Once I get the transfer, though, how do I copy everything? Transferring the domain doesn't let me into the server space, does it?

I can change where the domain points to easily enough, once I've got it, I'm just not sure how to get all that stuff.

I know my host allows CGI. How can I determine what the correct directories are?

I'm transferring from his netfirms.com to my networksolutions.com if that's useful somehow.

 

[Till]

Just log in with FTP and grab everything. Some permissions might get screwed up in the process, but if the forum software is reasonably organized, then that will be easy to fix.
For CGI placement, you can refer to this. Apparently, netfirms allows cgi execution from everywhere, which might turn out to be a problem, if you are on a unix host and need to have your executeables in /cgi-bin.
If you find pl and cgi files outside of cgi-bin, then there will be some hassle (if you are not on one of networksolutions Windows hosts).

 

[LucyDuke]

Well, he died last night. It's a waiting game for now, his wife's going to have to work with us and even though she's into the hobby I'm pretty sure the internet isn't her highest priority right now. I imagine everything can run itself for a week or two or three.

How do I just log in with FTP, though? Is the domain transfer going to give me that login? Can I just do it anonymously to copy everything? I want to be clear on what info I need to ask his wife for, if any.

I'm on a unix host. It looks like it'll be easy enough to move the forum once I've got into everything in the first place. ( found: http://codex.yabbforum.com/YaBB.pl?num=1190674425 ) If I have to, I can probably find out somewhere there how to create a new admin account from the backend.

Again thank you. I'll probably bump this when we hear from the widow.

 

[Till]

For FTP access, you need the login information for the webhost that currently hosts the site. If netfirms.com is both his registrar and webhost, you can use the same login information for both (and these two guides apply).

(and you are very welcome!)

 

[LucyDuke]

Update

Bad timing between the netfirms expiration dates and me being incommunicado for three weeks means I've got precisely four days left to get this addressed. I've been in touch with both netfirms and the widow. Netfirms can email the FTP login info and the domain transfer code to the email address listed in the account, to which the widow has access. Now it's just a waiting game to see if they reply over the weekend or not until Monday. I've also decided to transfer our primary site to netfirms because of some BS with netsol and SSL, so there'll be no worries about compatibility.