What you need to do to prepare for our migration to Discourse.

[HAWK]

It feels like it's taken forever, but we're almost ready to flick the switch on the New SitePoint Forums on Discourse™

As I'm sure you can imagine, migrating a community the size of this one is a huge job, and one that I am scared to death of.

There are a couple of things that you can do to make sure that your personal experience is as smooth as possible.

Ensure that your email address is up to date.
We will be needing to contact you with regard to logging into your new Discourse account. Because we don't store your passwords here, we have no way of migrating those. Unfortunately that means that you will need to go through a password reset process. In order to do that, we'll need to be able to contact you by email. Please visit your settings page and make sure that your email is current. You can check your email details here.

Save your Private Messages.
Just prior to the move, this vBulletin forum will be locked down so that it is read-only. Your user profiles and any threads that have been active in the last 5 years will be migrated to Discourse and the rest of this old forum will be HTML archived. That means that although you will be able to read all of the threads and posts, you will lose access to your PMs. If they contain important information that you don't want to lose, make sure you save them now. You can do that by scrolling to the bottom of your Private Message box and choosing from one of the three download options.

If you have any problems doing either of these things, please PM me or another member of staff and we'll talk you through it.
If you have any questions or concerns about the migration to Discourse, feel free to either post them here or PM me.

[Mittineague]

Will we still be able to log in and see all forums and our Profile?
Or will it be as a non-registered visitor only?

[HAWK]

Will we still be able to log in and see all forums and our Profile?
Or will it be as a non-registered visitor only?

Good question. I will investigate.

[mawburn]

It feels like it's taken forever, but we're almost ready to flick the switch on the New SitePoint Forums on Discourse™

As I'm sure you can imagine, migrating a community the size of this one is a huge job, and one that I am scared to death of.

Just remember, someone will always complain about something!

[ShinVe]

For what it's worth, if the functionality to login and view a listing of your previous posts can be preserved, I would be grateful. My posts are basically a library of questions I have asked, so I consult them regularly.

[HAWK]

Just remember, someone will always complain about something!

Heh, that's true. I'm all good with legitimate complaints, and I have a thick skin for the others.

For what it's worth, if the functionality to login and view a listing of your previous posts can be preserved, I would be grateful. My posts are basically a library of questions I have asked, so I consult them regularly.

All good, Discourse will allow you to do that PROVIDED the posts have been active within the last five years. If they haven't, they won't be migrated. In that case, you'll still be able to see them all here, you just won't be able to append new responses as they will be read only.

[volter9]

Dear HAWK,

When the migration from vBulletin to disclosure would happen?

Just remember, someone will always complain about something!

That's true!
Even though if everything is fine, there's still people out there in the internet who will complain for 'lulz', trolls especially.

[Jeff Mott]

Because we don't store your passwords here, we have no way of migrating those. Unfortunately that means that you will need to go through a password reset process.

There might be a SitePoint answer for that.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/show...=1#post5651030

[HAWK]

When the migration from vBulletin to [discourse] would happen?

Hi ya,
I can't give an exact date just yet (we need to find a date that works for several teams of people) but it will be within the next 3-6 weeks.

There might be a SitePoint answer for that.

Hrm. Let me look into that. Thanks for the tip.

[SEOZONE3]

Ohh!
After updating, it'll be a difficult site or all the functions will be same as it's now?
All my profile details, contact Id, posts will be deleted or they will be constant without any change?

Will there be any other changes with our profiles rather than Password reset?

[Mittineague]

AFAIK, and please correct me if I'm wrong

No new Threads can be started
No posts can be edited.
No new Registrations here, only Discourse
Certain abilties for members and Staff may be different, at least for a while.

I don't know
Whether or not all members will be able to still login
If Profiles will still be visible (depends on if we can log in)
If Profile info will remain
If Signatures will still be visible

It might be beneficial to "prune" as much of the database and number of pages as possible while still retaining some usefullness for older content. What's going and what's staying depends a lot on whether or not it will get in the way of the Move.

[cpradio]

Will there be any other changes with our profiles rather than Password reset?

Yes, there are a LOT of changes between Discourse and vBulletin. Biggest change is there are no signatures. You will still have a profile page that you can customize (to an extent). Those are the big ones that will affect users directly. The rest would be indirectly (differences in how the software works).

[HAWK]

After updating, it'll be a difficult site or all the functions will be same as it's now?

Totally different. It looks different and functions differently, and believe me... that's a good thing.

All my profile details, contact Id, posts will be deleted or they will be constant without any change?

Your profile here will be HTML archived with no-follow links. Your 4 posts will be migrated to the new forum and their current URLs here will redirect.

Will there be any other changes with our profiles rather than Password reset?

Yes, profiles look quite different in Discourse. It won't take you long to get used to, it is a much simpler platform.

[Mittineague]

Good to hear the back-to time is 5 years.

I've made posts older than that, but things have changed a lot and I am most often interested in more recent posts.

Besides downloading PMs, should we be doing things like emptying albums, our friends / contact list etc?

[HAWK]

Besides downloading PMs, should we be doing things like emptying albums, our friends / contact list etc?

The devs are going to spend some time working on how the archiving will work during their next iteration. At that stage I'll be able to answer your questions in more detail. For now, the PMs are the most urgent.

[WolfShade]

I canNOT wait until the annoying "Notifications" is gone.

Not thrilled about no signatures.

Looking forward to the new interface, otherwise.

[TechnoBear]

I canNOT wait until the annoying "Notifications" is gone.

There is a "notifications" system in Discourse, but it's smaller and more discreet, so hopefully won't annoy you as much.

(Personally, I'll be delighted not to have an auto-mod system moderating perfectly innocent posts all the time. )

[WolfShade]

There is a "notifications" system in Discourse, but it's smaller and more discreet, so hopefully won't annoy you as much.

Can it be disabled/hidden/set to be unobtrusive?

[cpradio]

I canNOT wait until the annoying "Notifications" is gone.

Discourse still has notifications In fact that is how you get notified of a LOT of things, replies, likes, PMs, badges, etc. It isn't very obtrusive, so it shouldn't annoy you too much, but they do still exist.

[WolfShade]

Discourse still has notifications In fact that is how you get notified of a LOT of things, replies, likes, PMs, badges, etc. It isn't very obtrusive, so it shouldn't annoy you too much, but they do still exist.

The current Notifications isn't very obtrusive, either (a button turns blue) - but it's still annoying (at least, to me, it is.) Can the Discourse notification be disabled/hidden?

[cpradio]

The current Notifications isn't very obtrusive, either (a button turns blue) - but it's still annoying (at least, to me, it is.) Can the Discourse notification be disabled/hidden?

Not that I can tell. You can obviously disable email notifications, but disabling the notification area on the site doesn't seem possible. However, you can alter your settings on what is being tracked that would likely generate notifications, by telling it to never mark a topic as tracked, muting categories (so you don't get notified about topics in categories you likely wouldn't visit), etc.

I'd highly recommend creating an account on meta.discourse.org and giving it a run so you can identify what settings may work best for you before we migrate.

[WolfShade]

I'll give that a shot. Thanks.

[WolfShade]

Well.. so far, it's not great.

I went into preferences and set it so that new topics and topics that I go into are NOT marked as "follow", rather they should be marked as "mute" (does not notify). Fail. New topics are still automatically marked as 'follow', regardless of what I set it to.

Other than that, the Discourse forum does look quite nice. I'd love to be able to automatically attach a signature, but that isn't a deal-breaker.

If anyone hasn't created an account at meta.discourse.org, I recommend it.. get a feel for what's coming. Very nice.

[mawburn]

Question:

How much like Stack Exchange is Discourse in the Community Controlled sense? Will we be able to make edits other people's post easily and peer reviewed, or will that be something only mods will do? Or any other kind of community based quality control.

There are quite a few non-native English speakers on this forum who could really do for some grammar cleanup.

[HAWK]

Question:

How much like Stack Exchange is Discourse in the Community Controlled sense? Will we be able to make edits other people's post easily and peer reviewed, or will that be something only mods will do? Or any other kind of community based quality control.

Great question. You won't be able to edit other people's posts, no. What you can do is flag them if they are inappropriate in any way. If x (currently set to 2) different people flag the same post, it will automatically be hidden until the OP edits it. If they don't, or it gets flagged again after edit, it will be removed. So you will have control over the type of content that you want in the community. The other major change is the Like feature, meaning that we will have an alternative to what we currently consider fluff posting.