I'm glad this issue is finally resolved.  There is one more minor issue that needs to be worked out, but hopefully everything will be working 100% correctly in the next few days.

SO any ideas you have, by all means, share them.

Where to start?  There's just so much that needs to be updated.  ALL of the icons for example are extremely dated (I'm talking about the BOLD icon for example when you go to make a new post), and the icons for replying to topics, quoting a post, etc. all need to be themed to match LBT.  As much as it pains me to say it, I think it's time for a whole new look for GOF.  Thankfully SMF includes themes and the ability for individual members to change themes, so member can choose to either keep things the way they are, or apply a new theme.

I would suggest a lighter theme, with text that's easy to read.  We could also make a "dark" version of the theme for members that prefer that.  But the forums need about a million little changes and it all takes time.  I might develop my own SMF theme and show it to you guys so you can have a better idea of what I'm talking about.  I took a look at the themes gallery at the SMF website and they're all pretty dated looking and awful, which means that either the ability to modify the theme is severely limited or (most likely), no one has really developed a good looking theme.  It takes a lot of skill to totally design a theme from scratch and have everything look good together.

it would just be a matter of finding a willing host that is capable of meeting this forum's needs - unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and the option to directly host images on the board.

Has financing been taken care of?  Who will pay for the hosting?  Will there be ads on the site?  I already own the domain name.  I would be happy to own and pay for the hosting account as well.  

In order to assure that the forums continue to exist even if one or more of the owners die or encounter other difficulties, I recommend putting the board itself either into an existing business, or setting up a new business (a multi-member LLC would be preferable).  We could then support it through a platform such as Patreon.  

People that want things to stand the test of time set them up in a legal structure.  The difficulty would be in making sure that everyone fully understands the working of the business itself, and that enough trusted people are involved in said business.

We're in COMPLETELY different territory than we were before.  We need to prepare and set things up properly.  In the past we were supported by Invision.  Even if some of the admins died or stopped being part of the board, the board would still always exist.  Now that we no longer have the protection and stability of another company, we have to obtain that stability ourselves.  

Basically it's renting vs. owning.  We were renting the board.  Renting a home is a LOT less work and worry.  Owning a home is totally different.  There's legal BS to deal with (taxes, insurance, etc.), and if something goes wrong, YOU have to fix it yourself.  And if only one person owns the home and either dies or walks away from it, it's taken by the state (or in this case, taken by the web host and the site is erased).  

If we don't set this up properly, we'll be in an even more unstable and dangerous position than we were with Invision.  It's too dangerous for only one person to own the board.  It should be owned by a company that has equal members, and supported financially by the members (through Patreon or another source).  If all else fails, the members of the company (most likely the admins) will agree to shoulder the burden of financing the hosting costs.

I own several businesses and I have contacts with an excellent accountant, financial adviser, and asset protection lawyer.  I've been down this road MANY times.  It's not fun, but I'm happy to offer any help I can.  The business needs a bank account, tax ID number, it will need to have its own tax return.  It may seem silly to do all this for a small board like this, but if we want GOF to exist for many years in the future, it MUST be set up properly so that its continued existence isn't dependent on only one or two people.  I know it's tempting to just pawn it off to someone like me or BadPointer that knows web design/development, but I fear this board won't be around a few years from now if things aren't set up properly.

I don't know if I've really said this on the forums here (I try to keep this to myself for the most part), but I'm a pretty wealthy guy.  I own three businesses and several rental properties.  If the board needs financing, I'd be happy to provide it.

I've done everything I need to do, except save my avatar. But I use it on other sites so that's fine, I'll just download it when I get on my computer and upload it again.

I really feel bad for you guys. First the Photobucket issue, now this. All because of greed and money from the companies involved.

Yes, these are dark days for the internet in general.  This is why I always make sure that I have FULL control over my content and my data.  I would never set up an important website that I didn't have 100% control over.  Even if you're paying a company, they can sell to someone else, or just change their minds and totally screw you over.  This is why I HIGHLY recommend going with a self hosted solution that also allows members to upload content directly to the board, rather than having to hotlink from sites like Photobucket.  Most hosts offer a good amount of storage (sometimes even UNLIMITED storage) for a decent price.  I don't think GOF is large enough to justify a dedicated (or even semi-dedicated) server, but I'd have to see the traffic stats of the site to know for sure.  

I really hope we can save the board, and that we'll look back at this time as when things really turned around and started going in the right direction.  I've never been comfortable with GOF being on a free host like Invisionfree/Zetaboards.  I'm sad to say that my misgivings were well founded.  I knew this would happen one day.  I just can't believe it happened so soon.  But then again, 11 years in the technology industry is like 140 years in real life.  Things always move so fast.

EDIT:  Do you know if member metadata (i.e. post count, join date, etc.) will be preserved in the move to the new platform?

To be honest, Zetaboards really sucks anyway.  I think it's time for a change to a platform with more flexibility.  But this time it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we set up the forums so that they're self-hosted, so we don't have to show ads and so that some big company can't just pull the rug out from underneath us like this in the future.  

I have a small forum on my website, TheLandBeforeTime.org, but it's based on BBPress.  I don't think it could handle the amount of data on the forums here without a significant server upgrade on my part.  How large is GOF anyway?  BBPress is rather primitive, but it has a lot of flexibility and it's easy to add code to it.  I know of a few pretty large forums with 20,000+ members that are based on BBPress.

This is a pretty nice find!  It's incredible to me that something can be found 30 years later like this.

Okay, this season finale would have made a MUCH better movie.  It was really good, but unfortunately was much too fast paced.  It needed to be at least a 3 parter, but would have been better stretched over 4 episodes.  We never really got to form a connection with the 6 new ponies.  I'm hoping we see more of them in the future, but this episode just seemed so crammed up with time constraints.  The scene in the dragon kingdom was way too long for such a simple thing they needed to do.  Overall, the movie should have been an episode, and this two part episode should have been the movie.

Well since no one's mentioned it yet, I'll give you my opinions of the movie   ***Spoiler FREE***.  The animation wasn't great (it lacked the same feeling and the characters seemed to have no emotion), and the story was badly laid out.  We don't even find out about the motivation for the main antagonist until near the end...like it was an afterthought or something (and it was a stupid motivation to boot - and I thought Starlight Glimmer's motivation for enslaving the village was bad).  The characters just weren't believable as they never prescribed any real motivations behind their actions.  Overall it was a very shallow film, not worthy of the MLP name.  

But honestly, this is like pretty much ALL movies I've seen in recent years.  Characters just have sex for no reason (I'm talking about OTHER movies right now, NOT the MLP movie!) when they don't even know each other, they throw some transgender or lesbian/gay person in for no real reason, and the directors don't do anything to make you actually CARE or even give two shits about the characters.  There's no CONNECTION there, and that's what was missing with the MLP movie too.  If I hadn't known the mane6 from the TV series and this was my first exposure to MLP, I probably never would have become a brony because they did nothing to connect me to the characters.  Which is fine I guess for the mane6 because we already know them, but I couldn't care less about any of the other characters.  I can't even remember their names.  I only remember Tempest because she looked badass in the movie trailers and I thought I'd really like her character, but like all the new characters they didn't do anything to make me actually CARE about her.

The bar has been set pretty darned LOW in movies in the past few years. It seems all you have to do to make a fortune nowadays is make a bunch of explosions and push the latest PC bullshit and people eat it up like mindless sheep.  I miss GOOD stories, with BELIEVABLE characters that they actually made you CARE about.  Not the crap I've seen lately (the new Star Wars movie, the Abrams BS "Star Trek" movies, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (I think it had something to do with Harry Potter but the film was so bad I don't remember anything about it), and now this steaming pile of a MLP movie.  I've seen a few other movies in theaters, but they were so bad I can't even remember their names.  I'd seriously rather watch one of those weird black and white movies from the 1930's than another one of those steaming piles.  Granted, the MLP movie is the best movie I've seen in a long time, but that's not saying much.

In conclusion, I give it a 4/10.  And that's because I'm biased and love ponies so much.  If it hadn't been about ponies it would be a 1/10 or 2/10 because they did absolutely NOTHING to make you care about ANY of the characters.

GOF works perfectly on a smartphone or tablet.  It's mobile responsive.  Some websites have a mobile version of the website, but I absolutely HATE mobile websites because they lack most of the features of the full featured site.  eBay is one relevant example.  

The only thing that could be improved on the mobile site is the background.  Unfortunately it would require making the background itself much larger in file size, which would slow down loading times on computers, smartphones, and tablets.  Not worth it, at least not to me.  A black background is fine.

Well good for Big Mac he found someone to date so that's good I did like that part of the episode but the rest was cringeworthy and just awful to sit through one of the worst episodes so far this season.

Agreed.  The whole episode was awful and made me cringe constantly.  The mane flipping guy was annoying as heck (I didn't think it was possible to make a character more annoying than Fluttershy's brother (Zepher Breeze)).  And that ending...maybe I just have a sick mind, but I can't help but think about the foalcon implications.  Foalcon makes me sick.  Why would an adult ask a couple of foals about relationship advice unless he's a pedophile (foalophile)?  I'm going to add this one to the list of episodes I'm NEVER going to watch again.  I think this is the worst episode of the entire series.