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Migration is happening middle of next week (Tuesday through Thursday). The old forums will be made accessible in a read only mode for a few weeks afterwards, but again the plan is to move as much data as possible anyway. For the avoidance of doubt: accounts and posts will carry over as well as any existing threads, but probably nothing else. You will be able to log into your existing account as normal.

AF-UK will be migrating to new forum software within the next few weeks. You may notice a difference in the appearance and functionality of the forums, but your posts and content will carry over. The Classifieds will be wiped and rebuilt (this includes feedback), but will be available immediately after migration. The current forum software has become a huge headache The forums run on software called IPB. Back in 2023 IPB decided to discontinue their marketplace, and ever since this has meant maintaining certain code without the assistance of authors of the various 3rd party plugins that we use for things like The Classifieds, small moderation tools and other minor tweaks that you likely don't notice like dead thread protection. Without these modules it's impossible to maintain the current rendition of AF-UK without dropping certain large features. A lot of you joined the forums for The Classifieds, and many of you solely use the forums for them so it's untenable that many of the modules that AF-UK uses don't work properly with the latest versions of IPB. We're moving to new software Migration could take as little as a week but may take up to three weeks. Downtime when the migration happens should be less than 24 hours. The new Classifieds will be more reliable and should have a few extra features when it releases with the new forums. The forums themselves will remain largely unchanged. Some data will be lost, but most will remain Although all of your accounts and posts will be retained, many items such as feedback and current classifieds listings will be wiped. Please use the next week or so to save any data that you may need as nothing is guaranteed given the age of the AF-UK database. There is still a small possibility that a full forum wipe will need to take place, but this is very unlikely.

Being worked on. Unfortunately the update broke a lot of stuff. I'm re-enabling the automatic re-listing for now. Hopefully not for too long. Seems like the lesser of two evils.

Sorry that this is happening. To try and get to the bottom of it could a couple of you do the following? Send a link to the ad you cannot renew Let me know the date you listed it Let me know whether this is impacting all of your ads or just some of them I'm looking into this now too.

Fixed. Auto renewals are now off (as they were before). Renewing your listing will bump it to the top of the queue (as though it were new).

Captcha issue related to the forum migration. Should now be resolved. Thank you for making a post.

I've disabled all header ads for now because I can't figure out why it's making them double height like that:

I've just turned them off. Google Adsense does 'auto ads' by default, and this meant basically spamming the entire site with them. Apparently it was 'running an experiment' and just implemented the results for everybody yesterday. The intention is for Adsense ads to appear in the normal two spots (header and footer). There should be no extra ads anywhere else. In terms of functionality they will just be like the ads already on AF-UK but provided by Google and in the same exact spot and size as those who directly advertise on AF-UK already. I would have noticed this sooner but funnily enough I don't see the Adsense ads as apparently it doesn't serve them to the account administrator (clicking your own ads is actually a policy violation too for obvious reasons so perhaps that's why). Sorry everyone for the temporarily more shitty experience. Edit: if you see any ads where they shouldn't be (or in a size that's not normal) please drop a message here and tag me.

Not wishing to merge threads from two different forums - I've replied to some of these bits of feedback in the quoted thread instead of here.

Not going to add any sort of post requirement before accessing the classifieds and probably never will. Whilst this does leave users slightly more vulnerable to scammers the classifieds are the primary access point for new members (some of who eventually become frequent contributors to the remainder of the forum). I'll also add that the relative success of AFUK's classifieds is that it allows buyers to contact sellers far more easily than some similar platforms (which then translates into items selling more quickly). If a change was made to accessing the classifieds it would probably work for an extended period of time but there would be a drop-off in new listings on the classifieds in the medium to long term which would precipitate as less content overall on the forums. Facebook and Discord are not only popular because everybody is already on there (in many cases multiple times a day) but because you don't even have to think about doing any amount of legwork before contacting a potential buyer or seller. Closing the gap between forums and big services like this starts at having as little extra work for new users as is feasible. The above is also why care has to be taken before adding new sign up requirements in order to help prevent spamming (I'm sure everyone is familiar with just how much of this we get). There is currently a cap on how much 'content' you can post/create before you reach a certain account age - this is intended to be one of a number of small things that frustrate people spamming and scamming at scale but it is a bit of an arms race with no solution that doesn't come at the cost of significantly lower new registrations. Did consider a 'bond' at one point of a similarly small amount which would be refunded after a specific period of time but this comes with loads of real life liabilities. Also as above any non-refundable small contribution for buyers and sellers would probably be catastrophic for fresh sign ups I'm afraid. I am likely going to add a new notification to make this more prominent to new members. As it stands there are two notifications that you receive as a new member and it's likely that adding a third won't help. There is of course the floating permanent notification at the top of the classifieds with a warning and some very basic guidelines. Any concise recommendations to add to this list of tips would be greatly appreciated. I've asked for clarification on this but for now the forum does not notify of new classifieds on Discord as we're probably not allowed to even link to new listings under these new guidelines. Although it's not exactly foolproof prevention of anybody who does a little bit of research on this (thankfully most scammers seem to be pretty thick) we do screen IPs (for anti-spam purposes more than anything) in order to catch VPNs etc. (to the degree that it is feasible to do so). Agree wholeheartedly. This is the first recommendation in the list recommendations given at the top of the classifieds for a reason. Anybody looking to save a couple of quid on a transaction of hundreds of pounds with somebody they don't know is asking for trouble.

This was abused by spammers and removed as a result. Sorry about that.

I use Dark Reader in Firefox but it actually makes the site slightly lighter (when it's already in dark mode).

Just report those kind of posts please. The flagging is purely for the kind of obvious botting that we've been sustaining (all of the vice-y stuff).