Just a bit of an update, as today was the first day of actual real work on LES, I could do, I might do these daily for a while or when needed.

1. I did some pretty big rule changes, the biggest one being that the community now decides who gets a provider tag, there is no more support desk (just use a PM or email), and all the price limits are gone for now while the world has gone a bit mad.
2. Added more offer categories and industry news categories.
3. @mikho and @Mason are regular users again (That might change; it was a good suggestion to have one or more of the old admins hold the dead man keys to keep the place going if anything happens to me as they already know the backend)
4. I spent some time getting familiar with the backend again, and the changes, 1 server has been made surplus to requirements already, just waiting for project rights at Hetzner, so I can move some out.
5. I cloned LES and made a new dev environment and worked on 3 improvements:
   5.1 - Ignore user plugin, figured I would start with something simple, it does not work yet but it's almost there, this will allow you to ignore all posts and discussions by any users you dont want to see or interact with.
   5.2 - Google AdSense account created and simple adverts will be displayed to not logged in users you will have the option to opt-in, but it is not the default and not expected, Hopefully this alone covers all costs.
   5.3 - looked at adding a storage volume to the Hetzner VPS and using that for images, so users can upload images again, they will be processed, compressed and have meta/exif data stripped out so we can get rid of the bloody imgur links etc going forward.

The quick and easy changes I can do first (I have help), I will get done, so the place immediately starts standing on its own 2 feet financially and have some spare hopefully for fun projects and to pay for community stuff!

Then there might be a period of not seeing a great deal as Vanilla is converted to php 8.4 and MariaDB 11.x

You might see a few little strange page loads over the next few weeks. Please try refreshing and hard refreshing a few times before reporting anything, if you spot anything that lingers, email me at admin@ this forum's domain dot com

About 16 hours of work went into this today, probably the same tomorrow, just to smash out the quick wins, then once we get to stable supported versions, we might have a few hours downtime while everything is moved off runcloud + ubuntu and onto Debian and then the rest of the discussed changes will start to roll out pretty regularly after that.

After all that, we need a new theme. I vote for a Windows Aero theme and a vBulletin theme and a Windows 3.1 theme... but then again, I am old.