: The biggest problem with this sort of overhaul is that we're not just talking
: about the front page - we're talking about EVERY page (except the forum).
: I've looked at the idea of updating in the past, several times... but the
: work involved has always made me say "eh, maybe next month".

: It's possible, I suppose, to simply pour the existing content into a new
: CSS-based template and hope for the best... but sooner or later the same
: complaints that caused you to post this in the first place would surface,
: for some other section. And we're talking literally THOUSANDS of pages.
: Like I said, some would import fine into the new template... others, not
: so much.

: I'm actually not averse to setting up a test - we could leave the content
: as-is, and display different headers/footers/stylesheets depending on
: which domain we're talking about, thereby testing the new code with the
: existing pages just to see how bad the problem actually is. I'm not sure
: when that could happen - these next few weeks are pretty crazy-busy here,
: with non-web stuff, so it might not be right away. But it could be
: interesting!

It'll definitely be a fair amount of manual work, but even just cleaning up the front page and then targeting the most popular pages on down would probably provide the most benefit. I doubt most of those thousands of pages get anywhere near the same amount of traffic as the top 5%, say.

I whipped together the sample in a day. Depending on what the actual implementation for the live pages requires, I don't think it would take much beyond copying in a few lines for each page and double-checking for breaking.

: The forum, unfortunately, is an entirely different subject. There's no easy
: way to move that to ANY other system - posts for WebBBS are stored as
: individual files, not database entries. So moving elsewhere requires some
: pretty drastic back-end work. (It's been attempted, more than once. Never
: successfully.)

That's sort of what I figured, but again we could spruce it up to make the current setup a bit more mobile-friendly and navigable.