BIG NEWS - AllDoulas is going BACK to being run BY doulas FOR doulas!

We, the moderators, wanted to let you know about some big changes happening to our site really soon. This Tuesday (June 12th) EmpowHER, the current owner of AllDoulas, will be transferring ownership of the site to the current moderators of AllDoulas(!!!) and also will be switching platforms from the current vBulletin forum to a phpBB forum. We will be back to being run BY doulas FOR doulas!

This is a great opportunity for the AllDoulas community! We know that many have not liked the advertisements, endorsements or policies for the past year and a half. After the transfer, we will not carry any of those ads, branding or any of the other things that were objectionable to many members – the boards will be back to being run by doulas for doulas - and that is where we need your help!

As we move into this new phase as a community, we need a few good volunteers who would be willing to take on rolls as moderators and we especially need people who are fairly tech savvy and experienced with php forums. Even if you can only offer your tech skills for the first few weeks as we get settled, that would be great! EmpowHER has generously offered to handle all of the tech aspects of the platform migration and will be available for configuration issues until Friday (June 15th) and then we are on our own. If you are interested in helping as a moderator or tech person please contact us on the forum or at volunteerAllDoulas@gmail.com.

Here are the details:
The site will go down for the transfer sometime after 8am (MST) and the outage will last anywhere between 2 to 6 hours.

All of the past threads will transfer but anything from the private forum or groups will not - if you have any posts in those places that you would want to save, it will have to be up to you to save them to your own computer before Tuesday morning.

Private messaging feature would transfer but your current private messages would not transfer - if you have any messages that you want to save, it will be your responsibility to save them to your computer (although you probably have a copy of all your PMs in your email so check there first).

All members will transfer but everybody will need to update their passwords once we have transferred for added security.

Paid memberships and private forum access will not transfer. We will save a list of the current paid members and will do our best to give them some worthwhile benefits once we are settled.

The doula directory should transfer.

The downloads probably won’t transfer (if a few people could pitch in and copy the downloads and other valuable content from the lesser used, non-forum, parts of AllDoulas, we could re-upload it to the new platform once that is all transferred.)

EmpowHER's widgets, ads and sidebar plug-ins will not be transferred to the new boards.

The AllDoulas forum page will become the main site page[

Updated functionality and design that has a lot of potential for new apps and uses.

We will be creating a forum on the boards for questions so please check in there for updates and more info. We moderators will try to answer questions as best we can there and really hope that we can get some volunteers to help make the new AllDoulas an even better community for doulas everywhere!

If you had left in the past, we encourage you to come back and be a part of our boards once again. We value your input and suggestions!

If you have any questions, we encourage you to ask them in the new “Q & A WITH THE OWNERSHIP CHANGES” forum. We will do our best to answer all questions to the best of our ability.

Sincerely,
Dorothy, Yvonne, Raeben, Georganne, and Michelle
Alldoulas Moderator Team