New forum: new registration? Would a separate readable archive suffice?
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I am going to be switching FD over to a new forum software -- vanillaforum.org to be specific. IPB is a monolithic piece of antiquated software that just isn't really catering to the way people discuss on the web these days, and it is a bitch to maintain and upgrade to boot.
Vanilla is built on a sensical MVC system, and it has a more modern interface and user experience.
My plan is do away with categories entirely, although tagging will likely be available. This way, your homepage will be a list of the current discussions by activity. We only have a few active discussions at any given time now, so this should help people identify them at a glance.
If we need any modifications to the software over time, it will be significantly easier to do with vanilla as well. This includes upgrades, which are really difficult to do currently with ipboard.
Everything I've mentioned so far is pretty much set in stone at this point, but I have mixed feelings about porting the data (users, posts) from the current invision board over to the new vanilla database. On one hand, it would be nice to have all of that data in the new system to look back on. On the other hand, the data would not be able to be ported over perfectly, and the vast majority of it is completely legacy crap anyway. The users are a good example of this -- there are really only a handful of people that actually login anymore, so why even have accounts for them all?
I love the idea of having entirely fresh data in the system, but I don't want to go that route if it would have a serious impact on the already minimal amount of activity that we have.
If I didn't port the data over, I would make the old forums accessible in a read-only state at archive.fdassault.com.
What do you guys think?
Edit: Also, I would likely be enabling openid, facebook, and twitter login options on the new forum. I don't know if that would impact your opinion at all. -
meh, the voting options are a bit broad...
Lets see, Yes I'll be pissed at having to re-register (especially if my coveted admin is gone!!!!!!!....) Will it make me leave FD? Never.
If you cant move the data over in a direct fashion(which I would prefer), and must leave it as an archive, then you might as well dump the whole thing. I really could care less about the data if its not at my fingertips and must be sifted through. -
I agree with Jono. Keep the current form as read only. Unless you are running into other issue with disk space, I see no reason to delete the current data. Don't bother with pulling over the users, IMO. We can spend like 5 seconds making a new account.
And for Gachi, I would say make a cron job that fire every minute to change is post count to 0. -
This is the only forum I still check on a daily basis, so I would register again. There are only a handful of threads I can imagine I would ever consider revisiting, so it doesn't matter to me if they can't be accessed. Same with users. They either re-register or they don't. Fuck em.
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I think I may be bringing over both users and posts after all. Last night I finished a migration script that successfully pulled the users and posts -- I have a few kinks to work out, but assuming I can work them out in a timely matter, I'll definitely do this.
All validated accounts that have posts will be brought over. To retrieve your legacy account, you will need to go through the "forget password" process on the new forum.
All posts from this forum will be "archived" on the new forum so they will all be read-only.
If anyone is interested in helping me "beta" test the new forums/migrated data, please get in touch with me.
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