UPDATE 05-01-22: Something got hosed in the migration process and after several days of struggling, I decided to give up on this move for now. We'll revisit it at a later date.
I finally worked out the previous issues I was having in moving the StP website over to the discourse platform. I won't bore you with the details, but it appears that image attachments are finally working correctly, which was the biggest thing holding back this whole project.
This is extremely good news, since the only alternative was to either stay on Xenforo (our current platform) or pay potentially thousands of dollars to have a professional come in and do the migration for us; something I was actually considering, since I feel like the discourse platform is going to be that good of a move for this community.
Unfortunately, this (bringing over our data) is really just the first step in making the move to this new platform. Next steps include doing some re-arranging of the forums/posts/tags, preparing the new permissions system, and probably hardest of all, creating a design for the site that looks good and (most importantly) functional.
This is an entirely new platform to me, so I imagine it's going to take a few weeks to get used to, especially on the design portion. So 'pardon our dust' is going to be a bit of a mantra here while I get things in order.
In addition to the software change, I'm going to streamline some of our policies and rules here on StP. I've already combined The Complete Guide to Using StP and our website rules into one Community FAQ you can preview here:
If you have any thoughts on that FAQ please let me know, it's definitely not written in stone and I'd like to get your input on it.
My point here is that I plan on relaxing the way we run things in this community to not be so strict on specific rules violations, but also give the moderators more power to discuss and decide how to handle any troublesome users that might come our way. In addition, it's going to be much, much easier for regular users here to become moderators themselves, and this will mostly be based on participation. Exactly what permissions will be available to who and when is a pretty large discussion we'll be having in of itself, so I'll save that for another thread.
The end goal of this move (after a TON of work over the next few weeks) is to actually reduce the amount of work I have to do to keep the website going. It'll be a lot of work to get there, but when it's done I will be free to move on towards doing a HUGE promotional push to advertise StP to folks in real life (something we've never done before in StP's 20+ year history) and focus on creating more community events (in real life meet ups, movie nights, discussion groups, podcast, youtube, etc).
So, a long road, but I think it will be worth it when we get there. As always, questions/thoughts are welcome, please post them as replies to this post.
Old post follows below for reference:
UPDATE 02-28-22: Unfortunately the update did not go as planned, and I was unable to make the move without losing a ton of data. This project has been cancelled for the time being and we will continue on the xenforo message board platform.
So, I'm considering moving the StP message boards to the discourse software platform.
For eleven years now we have been running on the Xenforo forum software (XF for short), and overall, I've been very happy with it. But it's not without it's issues. It's a bit overcomplicated for users, and is practically a full time job for me to add new features to and maintain. There's also the costs... for the software itself ($150/year) plus addons that give us extra functionality (like the media gallery). It's a lot to keep up with, and I'm trying to reduce the amount of time I spend on maintenance and put more time into the community itself, along with other projects like my youtube channel.
What I like about discourse is that it is a vastly simplified message board system that is fast, simple to use, and best of all, it's open source and costs nothing if you host it yourself. It also incorporates a lot of "quality of life" features we've come to expect from social media while maintaining the archival value of threads and posts. I feel like it's the best solution between the immediacy of social media and the power of being able to search for information posted weeks or even years ago.
Additional features include a built in wiki, and a knowledge base-like documents section that would be incredibly useful for sharing static content like FAQ's, lists of links and resources for hitchhiking, etc. Also, discourse is extremely fast on mobile devices, which is important, considering a whopping 70% of our users are using the site on a mobile device. The search is also blazingly fast as well, so finding content will be easier.
From an administrator's standpoint, it also includes nearly all the features that we have here on StP with XF, but either built into the software already, or provided by free plugins created by the discourse community. Additionally, it includes a trust system that I have not seen in any other message board software. In a nutshell, it gives new users more abilities (posting links, images, create new threads) the more they participate. This is completely configurable by me, but can include new abilities all the way up to becoming a moderator (with or without the need for staff approval, if we want it that way). This is ideally what I've been trying to create on StP with the XF software, but it's built in to discourse by default. This is not only good for mods and admins, but is a great way to filter out spam bots and spam humans alike.
Additionally, the trust system will make registering new accounts much, much easier, since we will not require anything other than your email/username/password to start, and additional options like discord, google and other accounts can be used to sign up to make jumping into the community as easy and fast as possible.
Now, it's not all roses and 40oz liquor bottles. By default, discourse is... ugly. Not pretty at all. So if you go check out the discourse website and it's community themes, try to keep an open mind and understand that I would definitely work on making the design more along the lines of what we have been used to here over the past ten years or so.
Also, there's just no way around it; this would be a massive change to the way StP is designed and how it works. Discourse uses a categories and tags system that would be fairly similar to our current categories and thread prefixes system, but in a much easier format for navigation. That said, StP currently has over 40+ categories of content, and that would be rather overwhelming in the discourse platform. So, this would likely require a huge restructuring of the forum categories as we know them now into much more simple forum sections. For example, I would definitely remove all the sub categories from the where to sleep section and move those threads into the parent where to sleep section and use tags like 'urban' and 'wilderness' to differentiate between the types of thread content. Another example would be to have just one section for destinations and have all the sub categories (united states, canada, etc) as tags for threads in that section.
So the restructuring of the message board would be pretty radical, but I believe would result in making the forums much, much less overwhelming.
Also, not everything would be making it through the transition. User accounts, avatars, posts, threads, attachments (photos, other files uploaded to posts) would all be carried across to discourse. This is crucial, since I am not willing to give up the 15+ years of content that has been posted here throughout our history. That said, nothing else will be carried over. This includes:
- Profile information
- Profile posts
- Profile banners
- Status updates
- media gallery
- file library (although i will find a replacement for this, since our library is too awesome to give up)
- private messages
- etc, etc...
You can probably already tell by my wording that I'm already sold on making this move although it will involve an utterly massive amount of work on my part. But once it's done, I believe it will make all of our lives much easier. What I want to know from all of you is if YOU think this is a good idea or not. I want to hear arguments for and against, and I'm willing to discuss any of those with you here. Also, I'm sure I haven't answered every possible question or how things will work, so please ask your questions and I will do my best to fill in those gaps.
I am currently testing an install of the discourse software here:
Feel free to look at it, but please keep in mind:
- it is a fresh install, no modifications have been made yet.
- it's super ugly. check out the list of community themes. i will modify one of these to make it look better.
- i'll be experimenting with various features. check out the discourse feature list.
- it's extremely under construction and not representative of the final product (obviously).
- i've done a preliminary content import from our current forum, so you can see what your content will look like there.
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