Discussing the migration of this community

Community
#1

Hello internet.
The Parrot team is collecting new ideas to improve the structure and the content of the Parrot Community.

We have many amazing plans for you, but one of the ideas i have is to migrate our community forum to a new software, and specifically from Discourse to NodeBB.

What i expect from such migration is to offer an overall better look and feel, with clear sections easier to identify and browse, customized page layouts and integration with other content and services of the parrot infrastructure.

Amazing, isn’t it? Unfortunately there is no way to migrate the old threads from the old forum to the new one, so we would loose every topic not migrated manually.

On a brighter note, we are introducing some major changes to the project, like the LTS branch, arm support and other big news that would make most of the support content on this forum obsolete.

I would like to hear your opinion

6 Likes
#2

of course the old community can stay on in readonly mode to allow old topics to be manually migrated if relevant

4 Likes
#3

I agree on the migration from discourse and the forum rebuilt from scratch.
I would like to suggest to have a very small amount of categories and organize eventual subcategories avoiding redundancy.

Since I like the minimal design (you should know that), I would suggest to avoid big buttons and confused forum homepage.

1 Like
#4

I agree, totally.
BTW, it’s very good news!

#5

good per me va bene

#6

you could use a chatbot to auto-redirect people with qustions that are already ansewerd here ,as an “old file cabinet” if you will :slight_smile: | plus it would keep your new home clean…also do you have an arm build beta i could try and break ?

#7

The real question is “is NodeDB is our final decision?” This is second time the forum is changed to new platform as i know and we don’t want to switch platform each 2 years.

1 Like
#8

Definitively, Node.js is the way to go, I’ve been giving it a try actually…

This is how the non-themed home page looks like:

This is the posting section:

I think we should set up a small team for selecting the most important articles (from each community/language) to migrate them to the new platform (that’s just copy & paste), so users won’t find themselves in an empty forum.

1 Like
#9

Hello!

Here’s my view on migration:

Moving into a New Forum Software which suits the community better is a good choice. Discourse is powerful yet kind of complicated to understand at times. But loosing all these valuable threads will really hurt the community alot. They do a really good job helping out newbies to professionals with their problems.

So I think it would be great to find out a way to migrate without losing the data. It would help tons of people. Also I suggest checking out https://flarum.org/ . I have personal experience using and managing Flarum. So I would recommend it to anyone due to it’s Modern Design, Simplicity, High Extensible and DAMN Lightweightedness.

Also I think it is possible to migrate from Discourse to Flarum (GitHub - SolidCharity/discourse_to_flarum: Convert your forum from Discourse to Flarum), it sometimes might not be straightforward but I’m sure the Friendly Community & Core Developers will help to make it happen as they always do.

You can see Flarum in action here: https://discuss.flarum.org/

Thanks,
EE.

#10

Hello,
I am support of this migration with just 1 concern however.
With the current discussion board, it is really easy to browse and read the forum in a browser without having javascript enabled. I’m not very familiar with NodeBB but I know it runs on node and uses web sockets. Will it still be very easy to browse and read the forum after migration for users who do not enable javascript because of security concerns?

#11

yes please do that!

this is exactly why i wanted to hear your opinions.

of course resetting this community from scratch also helps us a lot purging all the old solutions to old issues that are too much similar to modern issues that unfortunately require new solutions

another problem that i see is the removal of all the user accounts, and community users would be forced to register again with the new platform

i perfectly know it and i liked it in the past, but i trust nodebb more for scalability, infrastructure integration and security, but i like to see that the flarum project is still running, because i have tightly followed its development years ago

discourse also uses websockets and a huge amount of javascript, but some kind of dark magic makes it possible for users like you to browse it.

i will make sure to check whether nodebb is compatible or not, and i would like see you involved as well in our testing phase, if we ever do one

2 Likes
#12

Thanks, yea i was pretty surprised to find that discourse worked without js somehow. when I have time i will try to test this out by running a local NodeBB instance and report back. Would love to be involed helping with testing phase

#13

That’s an added advantage too. In that case maybe an improved & neat Documentation could help. I don’t really feel like the current one is properly organized and completed. Also as mentioned above important posts should be moved. This will help mostly newbies like me :sweat_smile:

It’s not far from hitting stable (The First Release Candidate will be released end of March). By now it seems so promising :smiley:

#14

As simple as it sounds. I agree @Serverket