Donations that have come in from this thread have allowed me to move forward with a number of things. We have a full copy of BP up and running on Amazon (AWS) for testing/bug squashing purposes, and we've moved NS there as well even for the 'old'/LIVE box. There may be some issues reaching the site (
@JCOSU86 has suffered some already) while this change propagates across the web, but they should be short lived.
Once all is golden over there, I'll set a target day and we can expect to be down for a few hours. It's then that we'll copy the live DB over, and I'll get to work updating all of our software (Xenforo, Elasticsearch, all of our add-ons and mods, and so on) and addressing a relatively short "to do" list that has built up since last season (game banners, optional ads for donors, etc.). Really shouldn't take *too* long, and right now I'd guess this would happen in August (though I may move faster, we'll see if my other BP (the pressure type) cooperates).
We are going to be moving to https, I believe. Won't impact your bookmarks as we'll just have http resolve to https. This, combined with the option to use two-factor authentication should mean that we've taken all the reasonable steps to secure your accounts. We haven't had any problems with that, but there's really no downside to being proactive.
Annoyingly, we are not going to be able to support IPv6 on AWS. Why Amazon is dragging their feet on that front is a complete mystery to me. While we have a pretty good number of people who (likely unknowingly) are connecting to the site via v6, it's unlikely to the point of absurdity that dropping that support (until Amazon comes around) will cause anyone any connection problems. Those few who ride IPv6 certainly have the old and still ubiquitous IPv4 to fall back upon.
I want to thank, profusely, the brand new donors. As well as, of course, those who have done so before. My goal has always been smaller amounts from a larger number of people, but it really makes me happy that BP is still worth going to that length for the lot of you.