Hmm, maybe I’m misunderstanding which posts you’re talking about, but I’ll take a closer look and try to extract the comments above:
This is valid, but I would argue that people searching for problems will come in from an external search engine before searching the forum directly. This might result in them finding archived, read-only forum content and an answer their question. If not, starting a new thread on Discourse is not a problem.
I agree with this. To me, active means conversations within the last few days, not last few months though. As @nukeador suggested, it’s easier for people to participate if a long-running thread is split into smaller ones or summarized and restarted in a completely new thread.
I performed a test migration to a local installation of Discourse. It ran on a local Docker container so I didn’t get a chance to save the results and it wasn’t usable outside my laptop anyway. At the time, there wasn’t enough information to link the old FluxBB user account and the new Discourse user account. I believe the problem was that the FluxBB database didn’t have email address or the Discourse account didn’t have email address because it wasn’t exposed as part of the existing OSM OAuth1 handshake.
This resulted in a bunch of “orphaned topics” that could never be linked to their real owner if they ever signed in to the Discourse instance. These orphaned topics cluttered up the interface quite a bit and would make it pretty difficult to participate in the new Discourse-based forum.
I imagine this account problem could be remedied with more access to the database, but that would require approval and supervision from the sysadmins to protect user information.