If you are a @Forum-Veteran that had an account on the old forum, then this news may be relevant for you, so please read on.
We migrated to this new forum about 1,5 years ago and we kept the old forum running (in read-only mode) since it has over a decade of content and Postcrossing history in it. We still have no plans to change this.
However, there are very few visits and people sign-in in there. While keeping it running has very little (financial) costs due to the low usage, it still remains a concern to Postcrossing that there’s private data forgotten in there on a piece of software that hasn’t been updated for many years now, and for which we are legally responsible for. The private data in there are primarily email addresses, (encrypted) passwords, and the U2U’s between members. At this point, a large part of the accounts in the database belong to members who are no longer around, or that don’t remember their login credentials, or don’t even remember anymore that they created an account in there at some point.
Considering how few people login in the old forum these days, we are going to disable the login on the old forum so that we can then permanently remove all private data from the forum database, namely emails, passwords and U2U’s (which can’t be accessed once we disable the login).
The existing threads/posts will continue to be visible without a login as it is now, so that will not change. What is already public today (without login) will continue visible.
We are going to disable the logins (and remove the private data) in early November. There will be a notice on the old forum about this change until then. If you still have something in the U2U’s on the old forum that you wish to keep a copy of and haven’t done so yet, please don’t leave it for later: once deleted it can’t be recovered anymore.
To end, just to be clear, we have no plans to shutdown the old forum and we hope to continue running it (in ready-only mode) for as long it is reasonably feasible for us to do it.
If you have any doubts about this, please let us know.