In an effort to improve the community engagement platform for all things Matrix, we have decided to change discussion forum platform.
IBP has served us well for some time, but it lacks some important functionality that we require for where we want to take the community and knowledge sharing in the future.
When reviewing other forum software, Discourse came out as the clear winner due to it's great list of core out of the box features, massive developer community, open source platform, and plugin & extension capabilities. It also has a great API that will allow us to integrate the forums better with the upcoming Matrix Community website built in Matrix.
Where are we up to?
We have been doing some migration tests over the last couple of weeks and things are looking really good. We aim to be ready to do a live migration sometime next week if all goes well.
What will happen?
There will be a cut off date in about a week or so and the IPB forums will be put into a Read Only state, where no more topics, comments, edits, or users can be created. From this point on we will take a backup of the forums and use it as migration data for the new Discourse system.
We will then migrate the data and test as quickly as possible to make sure all topics, comments and users have been brought across.
Once all is good, we'll open up the new Discourse system for everyone to access.
Will I be able to login with my old IPB user account?
Yes. User accounts and their associations with topics and comments will be migrated. However, passwords will not. This means that all you have to do to login to your migrated user account is to click on the "Log In" button, then on the "I forgot my password" link, then enter your username or password to get sent a password reset link to change your password.
NOTE: Usernames in IPB with spaces are not supported in Discourse, so if your username had a space in it, it has simply been removed when migrated over to Discourse. For example, if your IPB username was "my username is this", in Discourse it would become "myusernameisthis".
Will the old IPB forums still be available after Discourse go live?
For a little while yes, this is to make sure everything has been migrated properly and there are no major issues. We'll eventually shut down these forums (probably after a month) but will still have a backup of it for archiving purposes.
When will it happen?
We will put up an announcement on the forums as soon as we have an official cut off date planned and set.
Any questions, feel free to post them in this thread.
Cheers, Bart