I’m one of the engineers at Federated Computer and we’re responsible for the migration of the old forum to Discourse (https://discourse.org/).
The task of migrating a 20+ year old forum from a “dead” software platform to what you’re using today was immense! We needed to map and migrate more than 8 million posts, millions of responses, user profiles, even passwords and profiles were (for the most part) ported.
This morning we started to move the news site, the shopping site, and the forum. Everything was working really well but we had some issues with getting the Discourse software to let more than 10 users connect at a time. We’re using a load-balancer called Traefik and so we we’re scrambling to get the right settings in place for the software to work for forum.slowtwitch.com.
We believe we have things stabilized, but we will continue to tune and improve.
For those who are wondering about the last ~2 days of posts and private messages. They are NOT lost. We will be importing those shortly. We’re just ensuring we have system stability before doing any more imports and changes.
I hope you’ll grow to like Discourse. It is a very widely used forum software, there are a bunch of benefits to using it for this forum which will be rolling out in the near future including things like “private” forums, forums for teams, etc.
The amount of data you’re handling is quite a lot. We’ve worked really hard to produce all these top-notch opinions. Handle with care! lol It’s a record of our collective insanity. Future generations will need it to prevent our nonsense from happening again.
Yes, that’s definitely possible. And something we’ll have to monitor. The idea of private forums is more for “topics” that quite clearly aren’t broadly applicable. I.e., a specific group for a triclub. An alternative to a Facebook group. What we’ve avoided in the past - and will likely continue to avoid - is like “medium” size sub-forums. Very general and extremely specific sub-forums seem like they may not be in conflict. Of course, this also may not be appealing to users. But it’s at least a possibility in a way that wasn’t before. It’s not actually that we couldn’t have done it on the old architecture. It just would have been a fair bit of manual work to implement it. Whereas Discourse offers a lot more of that functionality out of the box.
I loved the old architecture. And I would say that we certainly could have built pretty much any feature on top of it. The hard part was that anything new we wanted, we had to build. And there just weren’t a lot of folks versant in the codebase to do that work.
In response to the women’s thread going bye bye you were the one that said you hoped everyone could share a single space. And that there was resistance to creating hyper-specific sub-forums.
Now you’re saying the idea of sub-forums is for topics that aren’t broadly applicable? I’m confused.
I’ve been a member of forums where the amount of options was overwhelming. I really liked the simplicity of ST and really hope it doesn’t go that way.
The next high priority item is a way to see all the available “badges.” We have to get busy on trying to earn as many as possible. First blocked poster. First ban threat from Dan. First time Windy calls you a name. First time you tell Windy his points system is embarrassing bullshit.
I need to play with settings and see if there’s a way to turn off all those things. Really if the notifications start adding up like Facebook that’s going to be fucking annoying.
the specific use case here is really for tri-clubs. At least from my perspective. if you want an alternative to Facebook Groups for say, planning an IRL group ride, then I think that has value. I’m much more wary of that bleeding into say, a subforum for “Trek owners.” Or “East Coast Zwift Riders.”
But I think there are some very narrow, very specific use cases where the ability to easily spin up dedicated sub-forums may prove valuable. As far as I’m concerned, that is entirely limited to tri-clubs. But I’m just one member of the admin team. That’s my feeling.
As I said, we could have supported that on the old architecture. But it would have been a much more manual process. Overly much? Maybe. Maybe not. I will say that I do not believe that “private subforums” is a particular compelling feature of Discourse for Slowtwitch. But we’ll see.
But I’m nearly 50 so can’t even work out how to single quote.
I tried a change in 1981 when I went to long trousers from shorts to go to school. I found that traumatic and elected to avoid any further changes for the rest of my life.
hoo boy…wait 'til you hear how easy it was to get that image in my prior post…
I understand the resistance to change. one day it’s all business as usual and nek minnit you’re getting told that it’s not ok to shag sheep any longer.
