Hello everyone,
I am giving serious thought to replacing this current forum with a new and more modern set of software.
This forum runs on something called Community Server, and has gotten quite "long in the tooth". You might notice that it looks somewhat old, doesn't work well on phones, and spam is an increasing problem. What you _can't_ see is that behind the scenes fewer and fewer features are actually working at an admin level.
In other words, the current software is approaching any reasonable end of its life.
I don't yet know what I'll use to replace it, and if you have any suggestions of great/inexpensive forum hosting please let me know.
I _am_ considering using something called Discourse, which is a new open source forum project on GitHub. It looks like I can host it in Azure for a relatively small cost - hopefully low enough that the ads on the site will pay for the hosting.
I'm open to comments/thoughts/suggestions - this is your community as much as mine, and I value your input.
I think one aspect that would be very important and useful is the ability to somehow convert over the existing messages. I vaguely remember the switch to this one a number of years ago and I believe there wasn't a conversion of existing messages.
I have never run a message board, so I don't know how viable that is, but sure would be important in my eyes.
Yeah, that's a real issue, and not an easy thing to resolve. As you can imagine, there aren't any standards for these things, so moving messages from one software package to another would mean writing an export/import app of some sort.
A more likely solution is for me to turn this forum into a read-only repo for a few months as we all transition to the new forum.
I have often found posts that are years old still helpful when researching issues.
Todd
I've been looking at Discourse recently as well, particularly at running in Azure since it is supposed to be easy to set up with the available images in the Azure VM Depot. I'd recommend giving that a try.
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