The issue with the Proboards forum was that there was a super admin (an employee of Proboards) who decided that deleting all of the posts made by a troll without even informing me was okay.
I don't understand the inner workings of the forum, but deleting posts shouldn't make the forum collapse. Don't all the posts reside in a database of sorts. Deletion should affect those records that were deleted but not the whole Db.
I think you're getting two separate events mixed up, so I will try explaining the history of the forum again in a bit more detail.
There have been three separate Apollo Hoax forums, on three separate servers:
1.
The original forum (2001-2005)
2.
The Proboards Forum (2005-2012)
3. The current forum (2012-Present)
The original forumLost due to domain expirationThe original forum was owned by someone who was a hoax believer initially, but he eventually came around. He lost interest in the forum and gave admin privileges to another user (not me). At this point I was not the owner or a moderator, I was just an occasional user.
In 2004 (I don't remember the exact date) there was a technical issue that lead to some posts being lost. I don't remember the exact nature of the problem, but I offered to help fix it and was given admin privileges. The problem was fixed, and the forum was running smoothly again. It is not the reason we had to start the second forum.
In early 2005 the apollohoax.com domain expired. The person who took over the forum from the original owner was not given the information he needed to renew the domain, so that meant the Apollo Hoax forum was basically dead in the water.
The ProBoards ForumAbandoned due to the unreliable (untrustworthy) Proboards service, but still accessible as a read-only archiveWhen the domain expired I more or less took it upon myself to create a "temporary" forum that ended up becoming more long-term than I expected. I registered the apollohoax.net domain to replace the .com domain because I was worried the name would be taken by a site that promoted the hoax theory. Eventually I was also able to register the .com after it became available again.
We used the Proboards forum for almost seven years with few (if any) technical problems. I only chose to leave Proboards because I couldn't trust them after they deleted hundreds of posts based on a request from a troll.
So just to be clear, the original forum did have some technical issues that lead to some posts being lost, but it was only because the domain name expired that we had to move to Proboards. And that was a separate issue from the troll who deleted his posts in the second forum. If he had not done that then there is a good chance we would still be using the Proboards forum today.
The current forumAnd here we are... it's hard to believe it has been 14 years since it all began.