[FusionWeb] Forum Situation

[Jeffrey Laramie]

Hey Everyone,

I wanted to take a minute to update all of you on the status of the forums. As 
I reported earlier, the compiz forum has a serious flaw that is making it 
become progressively slower each day. Due to the time constraints, there was 
a brief discussion on this list where Will and I agreed that we should 
advance the timetable of merging the forums rather that try to patch obsolete 
forum software. After a brief discussion with iXce and onestone we all agreed 
that this was the best course of action.

We took mysql dumps of the data in each forum leaving the original data 
intact. The importing process took some time and iXce and wfarr made some 
modifications to the import utility to increase it's effectiveness. We tried 
to import into our previously designed forum, but that caused problems. We 
ended up doing clean imports of each forum and then moving things around. In 
the end we successfully imported about 96% of the posts and 98% of the users.

Since this is a time consuming process, the data is already over a day old. So 
in addition to the compiz forum issues, we also have the added time 
constraints of the closed oc forum and a growing number of posts on the 
compiz forum that will not be imported. On the the other hand we have no 
desire to replace a functional forum with a broken one, and testing takes 
time.

Given these two opposing constraints, we'd like the rest of the members of the 
web ML to login to the new forum and try it out ASAP. At this point we are 
unaware of any issues. Please read wfarr's announcement for additional 
details. After a brief trial we will make the appropriate re-directs and 
bring it up live for the public.

You can find the combined forum here:
http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/index.php

Thanks for your assistance.

Jeff