Glyn, it would be good if could you share the roadmap for migrating to the new forum pls.
How fast are you wanting this process to take place, ie. is it to be a natural & timely process where members gradually drift to the new forum. Or are you wanting Moderators to try and accelerate this process through active promotion, signposting & linking from the old to the new forum.
Many members may be a little resistant to change, as the old forum is familiar (and got to say - easier to navigate??) so the concern is that without prompts, the migration may be slow.
Send out an bulk email to all 9K+ users the top 100 users of the old forum inviting them to the new forum. If users choose to join using the link on the invitation email then they will gain (slightly) elevated privileges so they will not have to endure the painful restricts of being at Trust Level 0.
At the same time (or a bit before) publish a blog post and pinned forum posts onto the old forum alerting users to the change.
Once started we should try and make the migration swiftly to avoid concurrent threads. I propose freezing the old forum as soon (or within 24 hrs) or sending out email invitations.
What do you think to this plan?
Getting thread new forum ready:
I have been working with yourself, the other early adopters and @moderators of the new forum to flesh out the categories get thing working in a way weāre happy with. Itās much easier to make changes such as move around categories without lots of users!
I now feel like the new forum is now pretty much ready for action. Does everyone agree?
What do you think of creating placeholder topics on the new forum for key posts as @bidouilleur suggested? I think this is a good idea, however itās very labour intensive! I personally donāt really want to spend hours copy and pasting. The old forum will always be there to reference and search. This is something to be said for starting with a clean slate
One final thing admin I would like to do is to enable HTTPS on the new forum before inviting everyone since this procedure may results in some downtime. I will try and get around to this over the weekend.
No sense in making more work than necessary. As you said, the old site will still be there, and with time, the new site will pick up where the old one left off.
I like the clean slate idea. Post a notice on the old forum telling the users when the switch is to be made, and that when the switch is made, the old forums will be frozen. Probably best to keep that delay to an absolute minimum to avoid the duplcation you spoke of.
Agree with above. Keep the period in between short or itāll go quickly messy and nobody will know where is a post or where to follow new posts. Some will resist as usual but if the mail for migration is easy to follow and on old forum there are nice redirects posted with a clear explanation ā¦ we will have already enough on hands to keep this place clean and help everyone with new āhabitsā ā¦
Also swap to https before migration as cookies/cache on local computers will be broken if they were made http and you swap to https ā¦ no need to add a second burden with potential readers loss.
As said will be away till Sunday afternoon since I hop to Paris for a meeting.
Sounds like a plan!
I agree with your comments, and also as Eric has said, keeping the changeover short to avoid it going messy or losing momentum.
Also prefer the āclean slateā approach.
Like Eric, Iām not around much this weekend (working on Tour de Yorkshire 2016).
Now HTTPS has been enabled and little bugs ironed out, do you all agree itās time to make the switch later on this week? I will get a blog post up beginning of the week and post a notice on the old forum.
seems it is now ok, did some hopping around the forum and it stays secure and when I manually set http://community.openenergymonitor.org, it switches automatically to https
Once the old forum is āfrozenā and becomes a static site will we still be able to log in and view PMās?
If as I expect, we are not able to log in then we should at least let users know this will be the case and probably delay the final freeze to give users more than a couple of hours to make backups etc.
Although the site will be static I assume we will still be able to edit content i.e. guides and the ābuilding blocksā etc so maybe the logins should be kept functional??
. Do you think the changes are explained clearly in my post?