Coming from ProBoards? Your community. Your data. Always.

You may have seen some of the discussion around ProBoards' recently updated Terms of Service.

One change in particular has understandably caught the attention of community owners. Their new terms grant ProBoards a perpetual, irrevocable and sublicensable license to user content, including specifically for large language model development and AI training by ProBoards and/or its partners.

That isn't how we believe community hosting should work.

When you build a community on ForumSpark, your community's data remains your data. We don't claim the right to use your members' discussions to train AI models, and we don't believe choosing a hosted platform should mean giving up control over what you've spent years building.

You can leave ForumSpark.

Obviously, we'd rather you didn't. 😄

But if you ever decide ForumSpark is no longer right for you, you can export your community data in the AdminCP. We don't believe in making it deliberately difficult to leave just because we happen to host the database.

A community can contain years of discussions, friendships, knowledge, photographs and history. The hosting company shouldn't be the thing standing between an administrator and that history.

Coming from ProBoards?

We've already seen community owners discussing alternatives following the changes. And worse, even closing their communities.

Migrating away from ProBoards isn't necessarily straightforward because of how their platform works, but if you're considering starting again on ForumSpark, talk to us.

We'll do our best to help you figure out what can be brought across, what options are available and how to get your community running again without simply leaving you to figure everything out yourself.

We're not going to pretend every ProBoards community can magically be transferred perfectly. In some cases, starting fresh may genuinely be the most practical option.

But we'll help where we can.

ForumSpark was built around a pretty simple idea:

You should be able to build your community without giving ownership of its future to the company hosting it.

Your members.
Your discussions.
Your community.
Your data.

That’s worth leaving ProBoards, IMO.

ProBoards is rented space. Forum Spark is like an a house that you lease to own 😄

In the past i only ever self hosted my communities, ForumSpark is the only forum host that i run across, that allows me to remain in control of my data, i would never consider Proboards and the like for that reason and for other reasons, such as all of them seem to have undesirable limitations, or things like forced ads, all those things are a non starter for me.

I'll be interested to see what some of the larger Proboards forums choose to do. I am part of a bigger one and visit it regularly.

Glad that I never used them

On Oct 5, 2026, Excalibur said:

In the past i only ever self hosted my communities, ForumSpark is the only forum host that i run across, that allows me to remain in control of my data, i would never consider Proboards and the like for that reason and for other reasons, such as all of them seem to have undesirable limitations, or things like forced ads, all those things are a non starter for me.

Yes. It was a bummer losing 1.2 million posts when Zetaboards went to Tapatalk.