Pack your bags, everyone! We're moving!!
After many years, it's time for a new home and that new home is the platform named Discourse. If you haven't heard of it yet, then brace for impact: It's different.
Why are we moving?
Well, it's time. The current software is growing long in the tooth, is frankly not that pretty, and is short on features. Discourse is modern, supported, dedicated to one thing (forums!) and it does that very well.
What's different, you say? I'm glad you asked!
First, when you land on the homepage, you won't see a boring list of forums. You'll see a list of recent Conversations. The Category (not "Forum") of the conversation will be noted with a small color code to help you navigate where you are. We're still working on how these will play out with the vast variety of forums that we have.
When looking at a Conversation you will find something's missing. What is it?? Pages. Discourse doesn't chop things up into pages. Want to read more? Just keep scrolling! And it remembers where you last left off and will drop you into the middle of the Conversation you return. That's pretty cool. You'll also find a timeline on the right side to help navigate the long, long, very long discussions.
What else? Rich notifications. Social Logins. Link previews. Emoji support. Badges. APIs. Plugins.
I was saving the best for last. Discourse is.....are you ready?.... It's mobile-ready! You may rejoice. ... OK, stop. I have more to say.
If you’re in a hurry, you can play with a demo version of Discourse at https://try.discourse.org/ to get familiar with the layout and functionality.
Things you don't need to worry about:
- All of the existing forums (30+ of them), topics (over 10,000), and posts (over 210,000) will be migrated.
- Your user accounts (all 17,000 of you) will be migrated, along with your avatars.
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Permissions will follow as well as they can, we think we have them set up correctly. - BBCode is still supported, but Discourse has a much better way of doing things. More modern. New shiny. Wow.
In fact, all of these have been done already! We're still testing, but we want to get you looped in and excited for the change.
Things you do need to worry about:
- Ensuring that your email address is up to date and working. (Very important)
- Requesting a new password on the new forum with the aforementioned email address.
Things I need to worry about (so that you don't have to):
- BBCode needs to be converted over.
- Embedded URLs need to be handled.
- Permissions need to be set.
- And there's some spam in there somehow. (How'd that happen? I thought the internet was a safe, neat space.)
We need to do a lot of testing. I will be inviting our admins and moderators over to take a look around as soon as possible.
Stay tuned!
Resident web monkey. Haka is my favorite.
