Discourse forum software upgrade

[kkremitzki]

I don't really have much beyond the plan you suggested of making the forum read-only and pointing people at the new forum... but I think we should try to find reasons why that wouldn't be good enough, and only if we've exhausted that search should we go ahead with it.

On the implementation level though, I'm assuming I would be the one putting it together and hosting it on the Frankfurt, Germany DigitalOcean server we've been using for a few other things. If we begin hosting our main forum on it, it would probably be good to formalize things and have that server be more properly under the ownership and payment of the FreeCAD project as I'm paying for it myself currently.

[openBrain]

Maybe Flarum may deserve some interest also. From what I read, it has a straight forward installing compared to Discourse. Seems doable to import from phpbb.

[easyw-fc]

Maybe Flarum may deserve some interest also. From what I read, it has a straight forward installing compared to Discourse. Seems doable to import from phpbb.

Flarum is on 0.1.0-beta.8.

[openBrain]

Beta 9 actually. Final release isn't so far I guess.

[dimitar]

I set up discourse since I've been quite curious for my favorite hobby/work - open source architectural design workflows: https://community.osarch.org. I did it through digital ocean, and it's definitely no wordpress, but not as complicated as I thought. Took me half a day. And most of that time was spend figuring out the cpanel DNS options for mail server, etc on my domain name host.

I imagine that the freecad forum would need to be on a slightly different scale though, but since you guys are discussing possibly hosting it on digital ocean, thought I would chip in with my recent experience.

[triplus]

Just note that FreeCAD by itself is an old dinosaur too. And there are no ongoing migration plans involved.

[openBrain]

I set up discourse since I've been quite curious for my favorite hobby/work - open source architectural design workflows: https://community.osarch.org. I did it through digital ocean, and it's definitely no wordpress, but not as complicated as I thought. Took me half a day.

Did you have to import an existing forum as well ? Or just install a pristine one?
I told about Flarum but maybe there are others. The point is that given the amount of work to do to migrate, it seems worth to take time to carefully choose the new engine.

Just note that FreeCAD by itself is an old dinosaur too. And there are no ongoing migration plans involved.

Can't get the point. FC is just ending its migration from Py2Qt4 to Py3Qt5...

[triplus]

Can't get the point. FC is just ending its migration from Py2Qt4 to Py3Qt5...

Highly likely MediaWiki and phpBB projects are doing some future proofing too.

[Kunda1]

proposal:

• play around with an FC discourse forum in real time...by setting up a test run on the .de server
• start the discourse forum from scratch (do not import older threads in to it
• start announcing the migration to discourse several times over the period of a month or so
• set the phpbb forum to read-only
• clean up the phpbb forum (removing any extraneous images and user mail that takes up so much space)

[triplus]

Are this serious proposals or are we just spending time discussing unrealistic goals? Therefore in short is FreeCAD forum shutting down in foreseeable future or not? If yes i guess people need to start preparing and to decide what to do next on an individual level. If not for what reason are we spreading FUD?