https://blog.ipfire.org/post/the-new-ipfire-community-portal
Finally, the moment is here. We are launching our new Community Portal based on Discourse!
What is New?
Together with this new IPFire Community Portal, we are launching IPFire People [1] - our new account system which is being integrated here, our bugtracker Bugzilla [2], Patchwork [3] and many other things more. In order to sign up for this, you will need to head over to IPFire People and register [4] a new account. That will allow you to login everywhere - a single sign-on solution.
A new categorisation system will organise topics better and hopefully allow us to keep conversations around a problem more contained in one place, have everyone join in to contribute their knowledge and therefore create a dynamic support community!
To be as inclusive as possible, we will make this portal English only. Having this debated for a long time, and after phasing out translations on the Wiki, we have decided that we will reach a maximum number of users and leave nobody excluded.
The project has a large group of users in Germany, but we keep growing and IPFire is becoming more and more popular all around the world. English is the de-facto language in Open Source and allows everyone to take part in our community.
Why Discourse?
Our support forums have been run by some outdated, PHP-based software for a long time. Every upgrade was a struggle. They did not look nice or add any features, but were rather a flashback to the web of the early 2000s.
After looking around for a long time for some better software, we discovered Discourse which is now widely adopted and feels more modern, engaging and is very simple to use. We hope that our community, which is large, but sometimes feels very quiet, will develop a different dynamic because of this and I am looking forward to be in touch with you all more!
Since there is no working converter and because of the changes in how the community is working, we are not going to migrate any user accounts or posts.
Retiring the old Forum The old forum will remain around for a little while. But since it is not being patched any more, it is becoming a security threat for our whole infrastructure.
However, it is a source of vast knowledge around the project. At the same time, it is full of outdated information and many many spam accounts. For that reason, it will disappear from the Internet in about a year.
The plan is to migrate any information that the community would like to retain into the IPFire Wiki [5] where it should be. In order to do that, we will switch the forum into read-only mode in a couple of weeks. At that time, we will also send an invitation to all forum users to create a new account.
Any new conversation should be started here, on the new portal.
Get Started
If you do not have an account already, please register [4] one now, log in to the new IPFire Community Portal [6] and become a part of our community!
[1] https://people.ipfire.org/ [2] https://bugzilla.ipfire.org/ [3] https://patchwork.ipfire.org/ [4] https://people.ipfire.org/register [5] https://wiki.ipfire.org/ [6] https://community.ipfire.org/