🚧 Forum migration test instance (forum/fluxBB > community/Discourse)

In order to check that a migration of the forum content is possible, I’ve done a full import of the current fluxBB based OSM forum to a Discourse test instance during the week-end (21 hours for the whole process).

The result can be seen on http://freebox.computel.fr:4200/

Capture d’écran du 2022-04-04 13-09-09

In addition to the script based migration, I’ve done a few things:

  • reorganized the categories to match more or less the ones in the current forum to minimize the changes,
  • recreated sticky posts in topics,
  • fixed some problems with quotes which should now appear properly.

Have a look at it and do not hesitate to report strange things.

Of course, the last posts are not there because the database dump has been done by @TomH a few days ago and it is note connected “live” to the actual forum.

Login is not functional at this stage.

20 Likes

Thanks for this.

I see there are some users that have this under their profile:

This user is suspended.
Reason: Invalid email address on import

Is this because email was not required for fluxbb?

I think so, I’ve not looked at that for the moment.

As we will move the osm_id to create OAuth2 direct link with osm.org login, the email address will be populated at the first login (as well as the avatar).

  • 19835 accounts have no email (recent accounts)
  • 435 accounts have no osm_id, most recent visit was in 2016
  • 282 have no email nor osm_id, most recent visit was in 2016

So… only 282 should remain suspended because there is no way to authenticate them which is 0.8% of the accounts.

one thing I’ve noticed are problems with url tags if they contain text like

Mittlerweile sollte die Abfrage [url=https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/commit/c5b6ef15e17bd2ec990c0edb3438807030d12179]deutlich seltener[/url] kommen

instead of “deutlich seltener” only the raw url is shown:

http://freebox.computel.fr:4200/t/foot-no-oft-falsch-erfasst-durch-streetcomplete-quest/86509/3

foot=no oft falsch erfasst durch StreetComplete Quest / users: Germany / OpenStreetMap Forum

3 Likes

It has been fixed meanwhile… because I think discourse is “rebaking” raw input to HTML in the background or something like that. Maybe a simple page reload would have shown you the fixed version.

I’ll check if some additional pre-processing in the original BBcode can help, like what I did for the quotes.

Thank you for the migration. Very cool to see some real content in comparison in both systems.

In general, I like the design, but would find it a great addition if the country communities instead of the colored square the country flag would be displayed. That would visually support the differentiation of the communities. At least where a flag can be clearly assigned.

And I noticed that the user picture is missing in a quote. Probably because the user has no user picture at all.

image

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Do you know how many of those never published a message? Maybe worth not migrating thousands of empty ones?

PS: In any case I think discourse has a way to detect inactive/no message accounts.

1 Like

First of all … A big “thank you” … that’s a great start to see what the migrated data would look like.
One issue I recognized after a quick look was the fact that references to posts link back to the old forum …

BR
tux67

2 Likes

That’s right, in addition to the redirect mechanism we already discussed, handling internal links would be even better…

I’ll see if something can be done for that too in a clean way inside Discourse which keeps track of these internal links.

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Thanks for your work on this, @cquest! Here are a couple of things I noticed.

In the United Kingdom category, I see this post titled Welcome! which I don’t see on the old forums United Kingdom category. It looks like it corresponds to this post which is in the old forums Sweden category. However, this migrated post in Discourse also includes a bunch of replies that aren’t present on the old forum post. I’m not sure if this is a one off issue or indicative of something bigger, but it seems worth investigating.

In each category I’m also seeing what looks like an automatically generated post named About the {Category Name} category with some boilerplate text. These posts are not present in the old forum categories. Like this one for example.

Thanks for the migration - it’s great, to get a first impression!

One thing I noticed. Embedded images are only shown as a link and not as the image itself, like in the fluxBB based forum.

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I’m seeing a bit of breakage re. Overpass QL code snippets:

http://freebox.computel.fr:4200/t/overpass-turbo-objekte-ohne-bilder-anzeigen-etc/83806/8

Examples:

nwr.grundmenge!"image"]

instead of:

nwr.grundmenge["image"]

Also blocks starting with [code] don’t seem to be recognized correctly as code blocks.

1 Like

I’m one of those users, see http://freebox.computel.fr:4200/t/interlaken-kreisverkehr-aufgehoben-bitte-karte-korrigieren/85032/2

I’ve not set an email address in the forum myself.

Hi @habi

Yes you have no email address stored by the forum, but your login is done using osm.org authentication, which is ok for the migration.

Superbe travail Christian, toute ma reconnaissance pour cela ! :+1: :+1: :+1:

1 Like

What I am still wondering about is how to implement / consolidate the OSM help and Forum Q&A sites.

Update: I have started a new topic for that as suggested by CQuest.

I think a new topic should be a better place to discuss this.

Let’s keep this topic focused on the feedback about the fluxBB migration test.

2 Likes

I see, the country names are all in English. I think they should be in their own local language and script, just like the standard map shows them.

If you want to ask/post something about 日本 or България you should find your way even so?

Nice work!

Some minor issues I found checking a few examples in the Thailand group

  • user avatars not showing (also broken in user quote header)
  • share post link points to localhost:3000
  • inline image not yet supported
1 Like

Will links to old forum posts be automatically redirected to the new discourse ones ?