From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tremer To: development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Migrating our IPFire Forum to Discourse Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2019 10:36:44 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============1461150601294240873==" List-Id: --===============1461150601294240873== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hello guys, The moment is here - finally! I have set up a new server with Discourse runni= ng on it - again. But this time, this all looks a lot smoother with our brill= iant new infrastructure underneath it. I would like to give you an update and what has happened recently and what is= going to happen, and where I need your help. So what has happened? I built out people.ipfire.org. You have all seen this. This is now our new pl= ace where people register for an account and where they put in a couple of de= tails about themselves. Normal users might not spend too much time here, but = we will definitely use this a little bit more because it is the place where w= e host our phone conferences, contact other people, manage accounts and so on. All services that we have (Bugzilla, Patchwork, Wiki, etc.) are already conne= cted to it. What was missing is the forum. Therefore I built a single-sign on solution for Discourse now. There is no re= gistration possible on Discourse. This is only possible through people.ipfire= .org. I think this is super simple, and working great! What is going to happen next? Since this milestone was taken now, we are ready to start our migration to Di= scourse. I have an announcement post ready (https://blog.ipfire.org/post/the-new-ipfir= e-community-portal, https://community.ipfire.org/t/welcome-to-the-new-ipfire-= community-portal/24/4), but I am not going to send this out, yet. Inviting pe= ople to an empty forum is a bit like walking into an empty restaurant - it fe= els a bit awkward. So, before we start with the migration process as outlined in this post, I wo= uld like you to log in to Discourse, play around a little bit, find some thin= gs that might need change. Even start a post on something so that we get the = place a little bit more lively. The new forum is called =E2=80=9CIPFire Community=E2=80=9D, because I conside= r the word forum to be a little bit dated. I have also done some changes to h= ow it works: There will be no German section any more, because that was alway= s a bad idea and has to go. I would like you to help me to police that as bes= t as we can. Then, I removed the =E2=80=9Cdevelopment=E2=80=9D area, because = I believe that we do not need to have this on here at all. We have mailing li= sts for devlopment, bugs should be reported in Bugzilla, etc. I would like to= separate those two things. The =E2=80=9Cconfiguration=E2=80=9D section is al= so gone, because pretty much everything on the forum is about how to configur= e something. It was a non-category. Now, I have split this into networking is= sues with some sub-sections for larger topics like QoS, Web Proxy and WiFi. T= here is a security section for IPS, Firewall Rules, etc. I considered VPNs to= be important enough to have their own category. Mainly to be able to split i= t into OpenVPN & IPsec, too. I would like to hear your feedback on this. I would like to avoid having an e= xtra category for every single option on the web UI and every single add-on, = because simply nobody will find the correct category when there are a hundred= to choose from. At thee same time, when someone is searching through the for= um, the categories should be helping them to find the right thing very quickl= y. So it is difficult to get it right I believe. The challenges ahead The whole migration is risky, we all need to do our best to keep the conversa= tion going and invite people over. Blocking access to the old forum will prob= ably make people rather angry than anything else. This has to happen, sooner = rather than later, but we should try to make it as smooth as possible. This is a great opportunity now for a fresh start and I am looking forward to= be able to talk to more people of our community. It is large, but people do = not chat much. Hopefully that will change. I will need to do some things on the backend. We only have one LDAP/Kerberos = server right now and we need more for redundancy. The user experience of peop= le.ipfire.org and the login could be slightly improved, too, but I think it i= s good enough for a launch. I will improve the logos on Discourse before we a= re ready to launch though. There will also be the problem to fight spam accounts, which we now have to i= mplement ourselves. We will have to see how this goes, but I cannot imagine t= his being even worse than what we have right now with our forum. Okay, enough of me talking. Please head over to https://community.ipfire.org,= log in, test, and let me know what you think. Best, -Michael --===============1461150601294240873==--