Let’s share a list of posts to migrate from UbuntuForums:
This post is a wiki. You can edit it.
Migrate
All subforums from Ubuntu Official Flavours Support
i.e. New to Ubuntu, General Help, Installation and Upgrades, Hardware, Desktop Environments, Networking & Wireless, Multimedia Software
Some subforums from Ubuntu Specialised Support
i.e. Ubuntu Development Version, Security, Virtualisation, Ubuntu Servers, Cloud and Juju (not sure about the rest)
Active LoCo subforums
All Subforums under Ubuntu Specialised Support
How far back should posts be migrated? Do we really need stuff from 2008?
I think five years is far enough back with the exception of the security sub-forum possibly, I will defer to the more experienced in this category though.
Resolution Centre and Membership Applications?
Migrate into a different category
Tutorials: so our forum members can update them as needed like sudodus and LHammonds that keep there tutorials updated regularly.
Not migrate
All subforums under Community Discussion (Cafe, Cafe Games, OS Chat etc)
Documentation and Community Wiki Discussions: outdated
and directs to a page that has been moved.
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter
Discourse already host an instance, I see no need to duplicate, In the event we want continuity from the old Forums instance, in Discourse I suggest we only post a link to the current issue.
We will be able to create our own categories right if we need to add some new ones later? that will not have to be done by someone outside the forum discourse correct?
I think it would also be useful to have some kind of record of previous moderation decisions. I can see a case where someone turns up who has form for bad behaviour, and it might be useful to be able to verify that.
Yes, I am also thinking all Staff forums should be migrated for they hold a lot of years of experience and wisdom on moderating and good examples of many things. If not all at least the stickies in Chitter Chatter and reported posts.
To be clear I believe even if a user was a problem member they deserve a clean slate here.
Ubuntu has this cool system where discourse posts are published to a frontend. The frontend can either be a toturial or a documentation page like in the case of the community documentation. Click on “help improve this document in the forum” to see the backend post.
The only issue is private discussions. Maybe that should be exported and uploaded somewhere here?
Can that be done without having to keep the archaic version of vBulletin? My understanding is that part of the reason for the migration is to abandon the old software.
Yes, moderators can create categories and subcategories as-needed.
However, before going far down the road of defining categories and other structure, I would suggest a webinar on the best practices of using Categories and Subcategories and Tags and Groups. Ubuntu Discourse currently does not use some of those best practices, which is why you may find the site a bit frustrating to navigate. That’s a whole separate topic.
That’s not an assumption we started with. But that’s why the list is a wiki – we knew assumptions would evolve.
How firm is the possibility of a read-only archive? How committed is Canonical IS to hosting it?
If it’s a firm assumption, then we should revisit some of the “Migrate” items listed.
I wonder what other assumptions we might be missing.
A great point. I have added that category to the wiki.
I see no reason for LHammonds and @nio-wiklund (sudodus) and others to wait. Perhaps outreach to them by the Forums community that this self-migration opportunity should be on their radar. One less problem later.
This seems like a real possibility. Probably not indefinitely, but from the conversations I had, it seemed like they could keep a read-only version online for a few years at least.
The age of vbulletin wouldn’t really be an issue in this case, as far as I understand, because they can disable any functionality that might be used to hack the forum in the application firewall. That is possible when the forum is read-only but very hard when it’s still active.
@ilvipero do you have more information about this?
I believe the staff sub-forums will be of use to us to refer back too if needed and yes they should be kept private.
I am okay with the forum staying read only and starting fresh, originally my post was formed in a question, “has the decision been made to leave all posts behind and not migrate them”.
When we go live on discourse will we just post in threads of current members seeking help and refer them here making them aware they do not need to create a new account here they only need to login using SSO?
Will Canonical IS setup the categories to begin with or do we need to do that ourselves after we get the privileges to do so? I agree we do need a class on categories, groups and tags.
Any moderator can create categories, subcategories, groups, and tags. No need for anyone else. I’m a bit limited for time today to start a topic about who should be a mod, do feel free to start that ball rolling.
I contacted LHammonds and sudodus about moving there tutorials with links to the tutorial section here and the link to where the tutorials are actually hosted.
When we start setting up categories and all for the forum, will we be able to make the whole process an invisible group to the masses until it is ready to go live?, I am pretty sure we can but since it is much bigger then just a few threads I want to ask.
The forum does have two scripts used to help trouble shoot issues on the ubuntu forums GitHub, one is the wifi script and the other is a boot script both collect a large amount of data so we can see what the problem is, I have access to those scripts they can stay there correct or do we need to move them since it is owned by the Forum Council that is retiring? For the record we have never let users just post scripts on the forum due to the inherent dangers of doing so.
A tutorial is just a normal discourse topic with a Wiki first post. I checked the category settings: Everybody should be able to edit. Not just mods. Not just us. Everybody.
On the question of archival of existing content, I’m going to chat with our IS folks on the options that we have available there e.g. Read only mode, some kind of conversion to HTML, etc.
For community documentation, we also have a frontend over on https://ubuntu.com/community. The content there is pulled from the Community Documentation category and is easy to for us to update and collaborate on. It’s fairly new and we’ve been slowly moving important community focused content there over the past year and half. Perhaps there is some content from the Forums that could find a home there.
Clarification: I think you intend that “community documentation” includes Forum Rules and Forum Governance and other documentation about the Forum Community have a home there, and can continue to be living documents there.
Not Technical guides, FAQs, and other documentation written by the community, which seem a poor fit for that subcategory. Those are a separate discussion.