Comment by csense
4 months ago
Rather than shut it down, would it be possible to sell the forum to someone in the US for a little bit of money, like $20 or something?
Idea being the US-based owner migrates the DB with posts and user logins to servers hosted on US soil, then if the UK government comes knocking the former owners in the UK can say "Sorry it doesn't belong to us anymore, we sold it, here's the Paypal receipt." (Ideally they'd sell the domain too, but as long as you still have the DB you could always host the forum at a different domain.)
Any forum admins here willing to add another forum to their portfolio?
Or maybe open it up to scraping so someone can archive it--if the content is that useful, surely some hobbyist outside U.K. with a few GB of disk space would be willing to host it.
Archive Team comes to mind.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/
https://archive.org/details/archiveteam
The US owner would still be obliged to follow the UK rules, apparently. It's unclear how punishment will be enforced exactly.
Just create a block page for UK IPs with VPN ads.