I really don’t understand why this discussion is still going on in a controversial manner.
cquest has shared his experience from migrating the french forum: It worked and it was done in a single day. He is also aware of additional challenges like mapping the authorization and I am inclined to belive that he knows what he’s talking of.
I have also migrated forum content before and I think he’s right that it is very easy to map the old links to the new items after migration. A small database created during migration and a few lines of php in the old forum location will do the job, with no discourse and next to no performance required. Even with that addional work and some mapping and cleaning up, I would estimate 2-3 days of effort, max.
cquest has volunteered and offered to do it twice now. So wouldn’t it be just common sense to appreciate his offer, simply accept it and let him do the migration?
@cquest can you coordinate with @iandees on any testing you would like to do?
I would like to remember that the last time we did these tests, they were not really satisfactory. And that’s the reason there are major concerns about the stability impact to this discourse installation.
Also we need to align on what we really would like to solve, if the effort of creating a static site is low and solves most of the problems (including links, search…) and the effort of migrating is unclean in terms of effort and still have some major open questions, we need to consider that before taking a decision.
I would also like @Firefishy to chime here, since he is the technical person responsible for this discourse installation and maintenance and we might be missing other technical/ops issues.
If Option 2 is the direction we go in, I would ask that there be a sticky note of some sort or a link list that points to the archived data for each forum that’s been replaced. It seems every time I want to search the tagging list, for example, I have to retrain myself where to look and how to search its archives, such as they are now.
Keeping track of the content, and more importantly, searching that content, is a major headache. My sincere hope is that this reorganization will make that easier.
Hm, if there are stability issues and discourse can’t even handle the data that the old, obsolete forum hosts every day without any problems, that would mean that something is fundamentally and fatally wrong with discourse.
Also, the french forum migration sort of proofs that it works. I mean if people have been actively using it for a year now it is hard to argue that it might not be possible?
Mailing list is off topic here - but naturally the solution-oriented answer woud be to migrate the mailing list archives to discourse, too. Everything old and new in one place/search.
I thought it was the claim that discourse should unite forum and mailing lists in one modern platform?
Discourse has an email mode, the question is if we also need to support the other way around and pull in traffic from mailing lists. It’s getting a bit off topic for this topic…
My experience is different - in the German forum I see - in my perception quite often - folks pulling up old discussions if something similar comes up or refer to them in a new, but related topic.
The point is not that users will find old discussions (in general on any forum I’ve ever seen or/and moderated the default action is to create a new thread), it is that they can be pointed to the old discussion and if necessary that can be continued, typically their new topic being merged in to the old one.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understood it, this attempt was performed in a local docker container, missing any oAuth-connection. And the upcoming issues were related to that fact.?!
Meanwhile oAuth 2 is supported.
My point being that have a single place to search all conversation and context is not currently possible even if we do a data migration from the old forums.
I understand, but I think that’s an important point of view for the forum-users: you’re discussing here about “taking away” there communication channel. Think of it like a couple moving in together:
There’s a difference if both are looking for a new place and bring in 50:50 of “their stuff”. Or if one is moving to the others person flat and is being said: We don’t need your furniture, because I already have everything we need and I think we shouldn’t clutter “our” space from the beginning.
Maybe some far metaphor, but I think this discussion has much to do with human psychology and a (subjective) feeling of being respected. At least if you’re aiming for participation and commitment by “all” parts of the community.
Just my personal opinion: Please do not migrate the old Forums! I know at least one country code forum that mostly functions as a hangout for native language chat by regulars. A true silo, but not so bad after all, it creates a feeling of community, a pole to roam around comfortably, providing even space for a bit of diversity. There did not much come out of that though, in the sense of constructive talk, that works progressively towards a goal, as has already been mentioned in another topic, and very rightfully so.
Nothing lost that cannot start afresh. Having a static archive so links from third parties (Wiki, etc.) to the rare valuable content there do not dangle, that is all it needs. A static site can be used to generate much better search results than the old forum software search.
I was under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that the help site was gong to be in some way archived or made read only but not eliminated. Was that wrong?
I imagine we would seek to keep some sort of read-only version up for some time until there was a reasonable content base here - it seems very unlikely we would just turn it off.
Are comments here representative for most forum users? I don’t think so.
I almost never search in forums. I start a new thread if I want to discuss/ask something. Which I also thinks almost everybody do. (But of course I don’t know. I only guessing).
Old threads are of little interest for me. Nice if the remains in some form, but not important to me.
