Hello guys,
The moment is here - finally! I have set up a new server with Discourse running on it - again. But this time, this all looks a lot smoother with our brilliant 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 place where people register for an account and where they put in a couple of details 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 we host our phone conferences, contact other people, manage accounts and so on.
All services that we have (Bugzilla, Patchwork, Wiki, etc.) are already connected to it. What was missing is the forum.
Therefore I built a single-sign on solution for Discourse now. There is no registration 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 Discourse.
I have an announcement post ready (https://blog.ipfire.org/post/the-new-ipfire-community-portal, https://community.ipfire.org/t/welcome-to-the-new-ipfire-community-portal/24...), but I am not going to send this out, yet. Inviting people to an empty forum is a bit like walking into an empty restaurant - it feels a bit awkward.
So, before we start with the migration process as outlined in this post, I would like you to log in to Discourse, play around a little bit, find some things 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 “IPFire Community”, because I consider the word forum to be a little bit dated. I have also done some changes to how it works: There will be no German section any more, because that was always a bad idea and has to go. I would like you to help me to police that as best as we can. Then, I removed the “development” area, because I believe that we do not need to have this on here at all. We have mailing lists for devlopment, bugs should be reported in Bugzilla, etc. I would like to separate those two things. The “configuration” section is also gone, because pretty much everything on the forum is about how to configure something. It was a non-category. Now, I have split this into networking issues with some sub-sections for larger topics like QoS, Web Proxy and WiFi. There 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 it into OpenVPN & IPsec, too.
I would like to hear your feedback on this. I would like to avoid having an extra 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 forum, the categories should be helping them to find the right thing very quickly. 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 conversation going and invite people over. Blocking access to the old forum will probably 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 people.ipfire.org and the login could be slightly improved, too, but I think it is good enough for a launch. I will improve the logos on Discourse before we are ready to launch though.
There will also be the problem to fight spam accounts, which we now have to implement ourselves. We will have to see how this goes, but I cannot imagine this 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