Forums moving to Discourse


(Bart Banda) #1

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

 


(Byrne) #2

Discourse is an awesome option which I’ve used with a lot of success!

congrats on having the migration behind you, already enjoying the UI.


(Robin Bilney) #3

Is there anyway we can turn off the system posting articles from the tutorials website automatically?


(Bart Banda) #4

These are just temporary as people hit those pages for the first time since the Discourse integration plugin has been added.

You can unsubscribe yourself from that sub-topic though if you don’t wish to get notified when new posts are made on the Community Site’s News or Tutorial sections.


#5

Any chance you can set it up so that URLs on the old IPB forum redirect to their new Discourse version?

It disrupts your flow a bit when you click a link somebody posted to a related thread and you get redirected to the squizsuite forum offline page.

I was hoping the old topic ids could just be added on to forums.squiz.net/t/ but it seems not!


(Bart Banda) #6

Unfortunately not, was something we couldn’t map properly because discourse uses its own IDs.

If you had an account on the old forums though you can still login and browse them and to find the migrated forum just to a search for the title, the discourse search tool is pretty good.


#7

I’m logged in to the old forum but still seem to see the forums offline landing screen - is read-only access restricted to staff and those that were in the “Squiz Clients” usergroup?


(Bart Banda) #8

I’ve changed a global user setting now to allowed logged in members to access the old forums when they are offline. Can you log out and back in to see if you can access it now?


#9

That’s sorted it, working as expected now!


(Damrongsak Sattabut) #10

Wow ! Discourse is flat beautiful.
Now i used Invision power board (IPB) The same as your old Board.

How do you move the board. Help to write it for me.

Thank you ^ - ^