Migration back to Discourse

[Anonymous]

Hello friends!

So... about a half year ago we switched the platform used here on community.neo4j.com from Discourse to a vendor called Khoros. We were hopeful about Khoros as a platform that we could build upon to make a great website for the community, with tight integration into Aura and the rest of the Neo4j experience. Unfortunately the roadmap for Khoros doesn't mesh well with our needs, and the forums themselves are not the best experience for technical content.

We have decided to revert the change. We will be migrating back to Discourse by the end of this month. All content and accounts will transition over. By the end of this week we should be synced up and will continue to sync until we switch over.

But, there may be issues that I haven't noticed, like content formatting that didn't translate correctly from raw html (on Khoros) to markdown (on Discourse). If anything looks amiss to you, don't hesitate to let me know as I will be diligently working through all issues.

I'll post updates in this thread as the migration progresses. Don't hesitate to reach out to me here, in DM or in email at andreas@neo4j.com for this or any reason.

Best, Andreas

[Anonymous]

Migration plan, broadly:

• migrate from community.neo4j.com to discourse.neo4j.com
• move users and content to new site

Migration plan, details:

• replicate user accounts
• move recent discussions, from beginning of year
• place community.neo4j.com in read-only mode
• move remaining content from last year
• all ok? switch domains: discourse.neo4j.com --> community.neo4j.com

[Anonymous]

Phase 1 underway -- replicate all user accounts

[Anonymous]

All users with any activity back to June 2022 have been sync'd from Khoros to Discourse. That should mean all users are pre-registered on discourse.neo4j.com and can just login with their existing account credentials (no need to validate email).

We'll now do some sanity checking before proceeding with Phase 2 tomorrow, Thursday February 2, 2023.

[Anonymous]

The user migration has revealed a now obvious gap -- some content is attributed to anonymous users, having originally been posted by a known user. We're investigating how to handle that, whether to have anonymous content on discourse.neo4j.com or simply skip the content.

Once that is sorted, content migration for January will commence.

-- ABK

[Anonymous]

Anonymous posts will be skipped.

[abk-of-neo4j]

I've become a casualty of the migration. The "Anonymous" posts of this migration topic are the result of my account being squashed. Apologies if this happens to you here, but we'll fix it on the other side!

[Anonymous]

Phase 2 is underway.  First topics will migrate over, then replies to those topics. Along the way you may get some email from the forums about posts that are created on your behalf. You can safely ignore those emails, and I apologize for the extra noise this causes.

[Anonymous]

Topics have been synced all the way back to June 1, 2022, when we had switched over to Khoros.

We're now working forwards from there until now, filling in the replies to those topics to keep the ordering correct. Threading may be lost, but all the content will make it.

[abk-of-neo4j]

All content, topics + replies, is now en route to discourse.neo4j.com. This should be completed today. So head's up: tomorrow will be a major disruption for the forums as we place this system into read-only mode and switch DNS around to  make discourse.neo4j.com into the new community.neo4j.com

[abk-of-neo4j]

Thursday, February 9th - Switch Domains

The final step of the migration is scheduled for Thursday, February 9th. Here's the plan for that day:

• place both forums into readonly-mode
• rename community.neo4j.com to khoros.neo4j.com
• rename discourse.neo4j.com to community.neo4j.com
• make discourse.neo4j.com into a redirect for community.neo4j.com
• re-enable the forums at community.neo4j.com (now hosted on Discourse)

[tms]

This morning, I got email notifications of old discourse posts that came after the migration away from discourse. It took me awhile to find this thread on this forum. I didn't get any notifications on the Khoros site of this return to the old discourse community.

My first thought (and concern) was that a breach had occurred on the old discourse site.

If it isn't there already, it might be helpful to pin a companion message on the resurrected discourse community.

[Anonymous]

Sorry for the spaminess of the migration! I _think_ I've now turned off email notifications, temporarily. I've also pinned the migration post on discourse.neo4j.com and updated the banner message there to reflect that it is a return migration. Thanks for the suggestion 🙂 

[tms]

No problem at all. Notification is surprisingly tricky to get right. I was on your side of this question for years handling push notifications for identify theft alerts.