Forum Migration (2018 edition!)

Off-topic Announcements
#1

Three years ago we launched this new site, a bespoke, custom built forum. The intent was to build it up to a good level, do some promotion and watch it flourish, well, this was a little naive, as anyone who creates web apps will know, they’re hard and take a lot of time, more time than I had available. The amount of time that goes into making responsive web interfaces that work all device types is immense. The promotion never happened and I couldn’t find time to add all the features I’d intended and that the community asked for.

Other things never happened due to time constraints, such as bringing the features and photo galleries back. This really, really frustrates me, we’ve got such a rich history of these that the world needs to see again.

So not long ago I made the difficult decision (for me personally as a developer) to migrate the forum to an off-the-shelf solution that would have all the features you’d expect from a modern forum and something that would receive regular updates and improvements.

The main advantage to moving to Discourse is the freeing up time to get the other important things done, like promotion, bringing the features and galleries back using other readily available software and getting things like stickers made up again.

With that in mind, we’re in the process of migrating the forum to Discourse, a very, very good forum software that will do everything we want and more.

I’ll update here once things move along more. At the moment we’re working on setting up Discourse and building a database and file migration system.

We’ll keep all the content and user accounts with passwords so you should just be able to see a new LB one day and log-in as usual.

I’m pretty excited by this and hope you will be too once you see it :slight_smile:

#2

Good luck !!

#3

Good going Jay. Thanks for giving this forum a backbone and means of keeping in touch. Really appreciate the hard work behind the scenes.

#4

Nice work. I still remember the old days when the forum had dark red (I think) branding.

#5

It’s always a tough call, to build or not. Time is always the enemy.

#6

good luck Jay, hopefully it will go smoothly! 

ps whats the rollback plan? cough-tsb-cough :smiley:

#7

Good work and good luck Jay!

#8

Many thanks to Jay and everyone involved in keeping LB going.

#9

Woohoo!  You’re alive, well I know that.  Good to hear the forum is still getting some lubed up love.  Chain lube ftw.

#10

Good luck with the move. Probably harder to move forums than to move house… :slight_smile:

#11

Thanks for all the hard work so far and forthcoming.

#12

I’m a big fan of Discourse and use it for our local residents’s association site, which is a much smaller exercise than Londonbikers but gives me some idea of what you are dealing it.

So a big thank you for all your hard work, it continues to be very valuable to a great many people. Much appreciated.

#13

lol, prehaps l can lend my Major Incident skills to expedite recovery.

Thanks for keeping it alive and hope all goes well, Jay

#14

Sounds like a good move! Looking forward to it.

#15

I know nothing about web forum development, Discourse, or the like.

What I do know, Jay, is that you have done a fantastic job of maintaining a great forum, without scores of adverts overwhelming the screen. Thank you very much Jay.

#16

Thanks all.

Hopefully there’ll be no major incidents or need for a roll-back :slight_smile: Though roll-back is easy, we just switch DNS back to the old site!

There’s a custom migrator being developed to get the content, messages over and then another custom app to migrate over the many gigabytes of photos.

#17

Oh and I’ve already built a new identity provider to ensure we can get GDPR compliant asap (using the brilliant Identity Server 4). This required a custom migrator being developed as well, though all passwords will move over so the switch should be very smooth.

#18

Oh and I've already built a new identity provider to ensure we can get GDPR compliant asap (using the brilliant Identity Server 4). This required a custom migrator being developed as well, though all passwords will move over so the switch should be very smooth.
Jay
like I know what your on about 
#19

Oh and I've already built a new identity provider to ensure we can get GDPR compliant asap (using the brilliant Identity Server 4). This required a custom migrator being developed as well, though all passwords will move over so the switch should be very smooth.
Jay
thats good. 

GDPR is the new legislation about holding personal identifiable data.

#20

And it’s a complete pita