Cancelled We are moving to the Discourse message board platform!

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After discussing it with those that gave input and studying the software more, I've decided we will be making the move to discourse, most likely in mid to late February 2022. It's going to be a huge move, so things here are going to get weird once we start, since I will need to move things around here in preparation for the move to the new system.

I will be sending out a general email to remind everyone to back up anything they don't want to lose in the following categories:
  • Profile information
  • Profile posts
  • Profile banners
  • Status updates
  • private messages
All other content will be safely ported over to the new system (including all threads, posts, photos, file attachments, etc); the above items WILL BE LOST in the transition.
 
Have you considered Simple Machine Forum? It's what I use to host carnivalcommunities.cf and the plus is that it's open community has lots of themes and additional free addons.
 
travelingtechie said:
Have you considered Simple Machine Forum? It's what I use to host carnivalcommunities.cf and the plus is that it's open community has lots of themes and additional free addons.
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I've looked over it, but tbh the feature set of discourse seems better suited to the StP community.
 
Matt Derrick said:
So, I'm considering moving the StP message boards to the discourse software platform.

For eleven years now we have been running on the Xenforo forum software (XF for short), and overall, I've been very happy with it. But it's not without it's issues. It's a bit overcomplicated for users, and is practically a full time job for me to add new features to and maintain. There's also the costs... for the software itself ($150/year) plus addons that give us extra functionality (like the media gallery). It's a lot to keep up with, and I'm trying to reduce the amount of time I spend on maintenance and put more time into the community itself, along with other projects like my youtube channel.

What I like about discourse is that it is a vastly simplified message board system that is fast, simple to use, and best of all, it's open source and costs nothing if you host it yourself. It also incorporates a lot of "quality of life" features we've come to expect from social media while maintaining the archival value of threads and posts. I feel like it's the best solution between the immediacy of social media and the power of being able to search for information posted weeks or even years ago.

Additional features include a built in wiki, and a knowledge base-like documents section that would be incredibly useful for sharing static content like FAQ's, lists of links and resources for hitchhiking, etc. Also, discourse is extremely fast on mobile devices, which is important, considering a whopping 70% of our users are using the site on a mobile device. The search is also blazingly fast as well, so finding content will be easier.

From an administrator's standpoint, it also includes nearly all the features that we have here on StP with XF, but either built into the software already, or provided by free plugins created by the discourse community. Additionally, it includes a trust system that I have not seen in any other message board software. In a nutshell, it gives new users more abilities (posting links, images, create new threads) the more they participate. This is completely configurable by me, but can include new abilities all the way up to becoming a moderator (with or without the need for staff approval, if we want it that way). This is ideally what I've been trying to create on StP with the XF software, but it's built in to discourse by default. This is not only good for mods and admins, but is a great way to filter out spam bots and spam humans alike.

Additionally, the trust system will make registering new accounts much, much easier, since we will not require anything other than your email/username/password to start, and additional options like discord, google and other accounts can be used to sign up to make jumping into the community as easy and fast as possible.

Now, it's not all roses and 40oz liquor bottles. By default, discourse is... ugly. Not pretty at all. So if you go check out the discourse website and it's community themes, try to keep an open mind and understand that I would definitely work on making the design more along the lines of what we have been used to here over the past ten years or so.

Also, there's just no way around it; this would be a massive change to the way StP is designed and how it works. Discourse uses a categories and tags system that would be fairly similar to our current categories and thread prefixes system, but in a much easier format for navigation. That said, StP currently has over 40+ categories of content, and that would be rather overwhelming in the discourse platform. So, this would likely require a huge restructuring of the forum categories as we know them now into much more simple forum sections. For example, I would definitely remove all the sub categories from the where to sleep section and move those threads into the parent where to sleep section and use tags like 'urban' and 'wilderness' to differentiate between the types of thread content. Another example would be to have just one section for destinations and have all the sub categories (united states, canada, etc) as tags for threads in that section.



So the restructuring of the message board would be pretty radical, but I believe would result in making the forums much, much less overwhelming.

Also, not everything would be making it through the transition. User accounts, avatars, posts, threads, attachments (photos, other files uploaded to posts) would all be carried across to discourse. This is crucial, since I am not willing to give up the 15+ years of content that has been posted here throughout our history. That said, nothing else will be carried over. This includes:
  • Profile information
  • Profile posts
  • Profile banners
  • Status updates
  • media gallery
  • file library (although i will find a replacement for this, since our library is too awesome to give up)
  • private messages
  • etc, etc...
Now, some of these you'll be able to re-create (i.e. you can re-upload your profile banner to your profile when we move to discourse), but everything else will be permanently lost. The reason for this is the script that imports all this information just doesn't work for those items listed above. But, the bulk of StP's content will remain on the site.



You can probably already tell by my wording that I'm already sold on making this move although it will involve an utterly massive amount of work on my part. But once it's done, I believe it will make all of our lives much easier. What I want to know from all of you is if YOU think this is a good idea or not. I want to hear arguments for and against, and I'm willing to discuss any of those with you here. Also, I'm sure I haven't answered every possible question or how things will work, so please ask your questions and I will do my best to fill in those gaps.

I am currently testing an install of the discourse software here:


Feel free to look at it, but please keep in mind:

  • it is a fresh install, no modifications have been made yet.
  • it's super ugly. check out the list of community themes. i will modify one of these to make it look better.
  • i'll be experimenting with various features. check out the discourse feature list.
  • it's extremely under construction and not representative of the final product (obviously).
  • eventually i will do a test import of our threads/posts/users and I'll update this thread.
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Honestly looking at the ‘sample’ of the new site, I don’t think it’s half as bad as you made it sound, I even frequent another site with a similar format so I have no qualms with that. I’m hype to see how it will evolve in the future.
 
ComradeAtlas said:
Honestly looking at the ‘sample’ of the new site, I don’t think it’s half as bad as you made it sound, I even frequent another site with a similar format so I have no qualms with that. I’m hype to see how it will evolve in the future.
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Once I found a suitable theme/style (it still needs tweaking but looks pretty decent as-is) for the test site, it really has start to come together more, and I'm pretty excited about the new feature set. There's a lot under the hood that I think is going to help the community a ton. A good example is the built-in language translation that could be very useful for expanding the StP community overseas.
 
I'm a little late to the party here, but I kinda like what I am seeing on the beta STP site, as it seems easier on the eyes than what I am seeing today on the present set up.

Regarding this:

Also, not everything would be making it through the transition. User accounts, avatars, posts, threads, attachments (photos, other files uploaded to posts) would all be carried across to discourse. This is crucial, since I am not willing to give up the 15+ years of content that has been posted here throughout our history. That said, nothing else will be carried over. This includes:
  • Profile information
  • Profile posts
  • Profile banners
  • Status updates
  • media gallery
  • file library (although i will find a replacement for this, since our library is too awesome to give up)
  • private messages
  • etc, etc...
Now, some of these you'll be able to re-create (i.e. you can re-upload your profile banner to your profile when we move to discourse), but everything else will be permanently lost. The reason for this is the script that imports all this information just doesn't work for those items listed above. But, the bulk of StP's content will remain on the site.
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Ok, if I was still under my original monkier of Earth, from 2010 when I first came to S.T.P. then I might have an opinion about losing all this, but on the other hand... while it sucks to lose this information, crap... how do I say this without it being taken the wrong way, but - does it even matter ??

I get what Eng is saying about stuff posted from folks who are now passed away or passed on and I'll even go so far as to add got kicked off/banned/quit/etc.... but, I do feel that a change is now kind of necessary.

When Google+ announced that they were killing Google+ and along comes MeWe saying that they can migrate everyone from G+ to MeWe, that did not take long to sell me on, but in the migration process I was able to carry over most off my pictures from G+ but all of my comments were gone, as I was using G+ as a means to document my ecology work.

I was bummed at first but then II told myself that I will just re-do the comments, maybe even make more updated remarks, that was a few years back and truth be told, I never bothered because it no longer mattered to me.

[*just on a side note, when I put the kabash on my 3 Facebook pages, 4000 [!!] pictures went with it, all of my river clean up/wildlife rescue/monitoring images gone forever except what I put on G+, now MeWe... and again, at first I was bummed out bad, but now - it does not matter.]

Ok, truth be told, I kind of liked the way S.T.P. ran in 2010, man was that a fun set up - and I suppose once it changed to what we have now, that must have been during one of my "off" periods of time, question: why was that format given up ??

Matt, go for it - I have a feeling it will jump start some much needed life here perhaps from both old and new members.

PS: all my edits were for spelling errors that I keep finding each time I re-read this, apologies for those I missed as my wireless keyboard sometimes has it's own ideas of how the letters transfer over to the laptop,
 
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WOW I did not know that this is happening / would happen so soon ! Is there no way for all the content to be backed up in raw files in a big hard drive ? I’m willing to pitch in and get the largest external HDD there is right now (18-20TB ?) and just have everything downloaded and sorted out later for history’s sake. This website contains really invaluable information on nomadic life, community, stories, subjectivities in the late 20th / early 21st century CE (one of the largest repositories I think existing) and it would be really tragic for the most important sociological-historical content (photos, messages, etc) to be lost forever. I really think it is imperative all the information is archived somehow. I also think that all the information should be stored like a time capsule and donated to an academic institution for archival (UC Berkeley, Smithonian, etc) to be opened some point in the future (say give or take a century – most of us will be dead by then so nothing has a chance of embarrassing anyone). Historians and anthropologists of the future will be deeply saddened if they knew how much of this nomadic Library of Alexandria was laid waste; though would be extremely glad and grateful to know that there exists so many intact fragments to study because humans of the past (our now) took the time and thought to archive things !
 
seeking existence said:
WOW I did not know that this is happening / would happen so soon ! Is there no way for all the content to be backed up in raw files in a big hard drive ? I’m willing to pitch in and get the largest external HDD there is right now (18-20TB ?) and just have everything downloaded and sorted out later for history’s sake. This website contains really invaluable information on nomadic life, community, stories, subjectivities in the late 20th / early 21st century CE (one of the largest repositories I think existing) and it would be really tragic for the most important sociological-historical content (photos, messages, etc) to be lost forever. I really think it is imperative all the information is archived somehow. I also think that all the information should be stored like a time capsule and donated to an academic institution for archival (UC Berkeley, Smithonian, etc) to be opened some point in the future (say give or take a century – most of us will be dead by then so nothing has a chance of embarrassing anyone). Historians and anthropologists of the future will be deeply saddened if they knew how much of this nomadic Library of Alexandria was laid waste; though would be extremely glad and grateful to know that there exists so many intact fragments to study because humans of the past (our now) took the time and thought to archive things !
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i'll copy/paste my response i gave in the PM you sent me about this:

i think you're maybe overreacting a bit, as stated:
Matt Derrick said:
While 90% of the content will make the move safely
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the only thing being lost is profile posts and the things listed above. the entirety of stp is only about 30gb, and 95% of that will be moved over to the new site safely :)
 
Okay folks, for those following this thread, my last big job hurdle is out of the way, so I am going to start working on moving forums and threads around here to match the hierarchy seen on the beta website. A LOT of things are going to move around and some will disappear, so pardon my dust during this period.
 
I've used both Xenforo and Discourse, bot have their pros and cons although I must say I very much like how you have it set up here on Xenforo -- it's one of the best XF forums I've seen and the layout, categorization, use, etc. is excellent so I will miss that for sure.

Wishing you the best of luck though -- I know how hard it can be to migrate between platforms!

Congrats on the success of your community -- it's very vibrant.

Ray

P.S. Will you keep the old forums archived online somewhere?
 
AlongtheRay, that's like the best profile picture I have ever seen here !!

I think that the forums will stay, but all the profile stuff will vanish - again, I think that's what is going to happen once the day comes foor the big change....
 
Big George W said:
AlongtheRay, that's like the best profile picture I have ever seen here !!

I think that the forums will stay, but all the profile stuff will vanish - again, I think that's what is going to happen once the day comes foor the big change....
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just to be clear, profiles won't vanish entirely, the information on your current profile might be lost, but you can just re-fill out your profile after the move.
 
A quick update for those following this thread, I've completed the consolidation of over 1500 tags down to around 1000 tags. Since discourse depends a lot on tags for navigation, this was necessary to do before the move over. I might try and make the move over this weekend and see how it goes. Of course I'll put up an announcement when I do.

In the meantime, I will be turning off plugins that provide various features you might be used to. Most of these features will be replaced by ones from the new discourse forum system. So if something disappears, it's probably because of that. Of course let me know if you need help finding something and I will let you know if it's available.
 
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Unfortunately, the end result of about 4-5 days of testing was that I could not get the attachments (i.e. files and photos) to make the move over to the new platform, so I had to give up and for the foreseeable future we will be continuing on the xenforo platform.
 
Matt, you tried very hard to make this move happen, but at least the forum will continue to exist in it's present form, with nothing lost.

A+ for effort.

Thanks again Matt for everything you do here to keep STP running strong after all these years.

Chin Up !!
 
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