Introducing Hockeybulletin

My hometown's local hockey club (Linköping HC, plays in SHL (Swedish Hockey League) have had an Internet forum since the end of the 90s in various forms. Since around 2000, that forum was made in PhpBB. I have always been a member of that community and about 5 years ago the admin at the time was wondering if someone else would be willing to help out and take over the maintenance of the forums.

I became involved in the project and for the first years I only made sure that the forums were working properly and updating it to the newest phpbb versions. In 2020, I felt that Flarum was mature enough and decided to migrate the forums over from phpbb (quite a tedious process making sure all users and posts were properly migrated over).

After the migration to Flarum, the forums became more active and as I was getting more busy with work and family I felt the need to look for someone else to run the forums, someone with experience with Flarum and hosting. As our forums are revolving around a sports team, there was a need to have a server infrastructure that would be able to scale during peak hours (e.g. during a game). I initially tried to throw more money at the server I hosted the forums on but without competence on how to properly optimize the instance it did not really matter. The forums went from about 20 concurrent users during the day to peaking at 300 concurrent users making the forums crash and lag out.

At this time, I found that [Flarum Hosting] was starting and immediately announced my interest. I have seen the names involved in the project involved in the core development of Flarum and working with someone whom I know 1) Knows the plattform very well and 2) very actively still contributing to the development of it sounded like a perfect fit. The [Flarum Hosting] team also offers scalable solutions which is something that is a perfect match for me with my inconsistent user surges.