Tomorrow, 12 Feb 2018, will be our 10 year anniversary of these forums.
A lot has changed in 10 years, including forum / discussion software. The phpBB forums here are dated and have a growing number of issues that we need to address - no mobile friendly layout, security issues and a tired look to name but a few.
We think it is time for a change, and I've done some research and the Discourse platform looks to be a good replacement for these forums. If you are involved in other online communities, you may have found that Discourse it used a lot and has an ever growing presence.
If you haven't seen Discourse before, take a look at the Discourse platform - or take a look at the FAQ section of this post - you'll see a list of features we think are pretty cool.
Let us know in the poll if you think you'd prefer us to migrate these forums to that platform - or if you have an alternative in mind, reply with any suggestions.
Also, if you have any concerns or questions, just reply to this post.
We'll be able to migrate the existing posts, and from what I can tell even your profile information - including username and password will be retained (provided the password meets the security requirements - if not then you'll be prompted to perform a password reset when you first try to login). Of course, we'll test this migration first and even give you chance to preview the new platform with the migrated data before switching over, during our testing phase.
This has been posted here, in the Jiwa 7 / Technical Programming forum, as it is by far the most seen and used sub-forum.
FAQ
Q: What are the benefits to me - as a forum user - of moving to Discourse?
A:
- A modern UI
- Mobile Friendly (you can use your tablet or smartphone easily)
- You can @mention people, and they'll get a notification. Users will also get a notification if anyone quotes them, PM's them, likes any of their posts, or replies to a thread they are watching
- You can get browser notifications so you don't even have to keep checking the site.
- Post a link to a photo, a video or a tweet and they'll automatically get embedded into the post
- Group Messaging - Want to take something off the forum? You can! Just start a PM and add multiple recipients - add more even during the conversation
- Automatic forum search when posting new threads - whenever anyone goes to post a new thread, the system carries out a search while they are typing and displays it prominently over the preview box
- Intelligent quote system - Just highlight some text in someone's post and you'll get the option to 'Quote text'
- Automatic code highlighting - Post some code enclosed in backticks at both start ends and the code gets highlighted. Post three backticks on a seperate line before and after the code block for blocks of code. Put the name of the langauge after the oppening ticks to specify a language (if you don't the system will try to guess the language)
- Drafts of your posts are saved as you type - if you accidentally close your browser or your machine reboots half way through a post, it'll be there when you come back
- The ability to cross reference other posts
Q: I have links (URLs) stored offline to useful forum posts - will they still work?
A: Not sure yet - but we plan on doing some URL rewrites to make any links to the old forums redirect to the correct post or topic in the new forums - we'll work on this in the testing phase.
Q: What will happen regarding the content of the current forums in terms of attachments etc, can this be migrated?
A: Yes - all attachments, images and code snippets will be migrated.
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