Announcement: New Discourse Site to Go Live this Weekend

Update: Both the new site and site are live.

We plan to set this site ( www.unix.com ) to read only and there will be no new registrations here after this weekend.

I plan do the "final" migration on Saturday or Sunday and will put a banner up on this site to mention the site and the details.

When the cutover is made all members will need to do the "lost password" thing to create a new (stronger) password (this step has been tested). Password and PMs will not migrate to the new Discourse site.

Basically, we plan to leave this site up as a "read only" reference and all new Q&A will be on the new, modern, site.

Everyone who has tested the new site so far has commented how great it is; and how much better it is than this old, legacy site; and I'm sure everyone will love it; especially mobile users but it's great on desktop top too.

Thanks to all the moderators who tested over the past few days. Every mod who tested loved it.

Wait, we'll get a new url?
Or will 'this page' just move to an archive dir?

This site will stay the same, READ ONLY.

The new site will have a new name which I will put in the banner of this site when the cutover is done.

It will be easy to find, do not worry.

All the links here will remain the same for the foreseeable future.... but all the posts will migrate to the new site. In fact, they are all already migrated except for the past few hours. Tomorrow I will make this site read only and do the final "sync" before making this site a "reference site".

All your posts, status and your "thanks" (converted into "likes") will remain the same; except you will have higher status on the new site

In the future, may work on changing all permalinks on the new site to match this one, but I don't see any compelling reason to do it. For the next few months, both sites will link to each other in various ways.

Cheers.

You can post as normal, as I will sync all the latest posts this weekend when we go "read only"....

1136×697 137 KB

FYI:

We have started the process of the "final migration" to the new community site.

New posts and new registrations on www.unix.com are disabled.

Details on the site site coming soon.

Please stand by and thank you for your patience.

New site is up and running.... Enjoy!

All existing users from www.unix.com who have not logged into this new site will need to reset their password to login.

So
Welcome to all the newcomers!

Update:

The moderation team has decided to open both forums, the old vB forum (this one) and the new one (Discourse forum) for the time being.

We want to get more user feedback and also consider fixing some small nits related to how code is preprocessed on the discourse side, from here.

Scrutinizer did an excellent check and notice that the preprocessing of the code in posts turned \n in code fragments to hard new lines in the results on discourse.

We are looking into the best was to fix this.

Hi Neo...

Will we still need our old user and password for this site, because if it is read only then they are not really required.

Barry...

When the day comes where this site is read-only all logins processes will be disabled so password hashes in a DB are mostly irrelevent.

Cheers.

On another note:

I have had a few people comment about converting new site to www.unix.com versus community.unix.com , so let me remind everyone:

This site has over 200K man pages and none of the man pages migrate to the new forum (anytime soon, we may write a plugin for this sometime in the future, however).

So, this site has a lot of reference material which is very important, including man pages and code.

In some instance, the migration of legacy posts with code from here to discourse has results in instances of "code mangling" where, for example, the original vB4 to Discourse migration script changed new lines chars "\n" to hard line breaks in code fragements.

Our moderator (and Poster of the Year 2019 as well), Scrutinizer is working on perfecting this Ruby script and when he is done; we will test this on a staging site and then update all the posts on the new site.

Even when the new site reaches "perfection" (or 99.9..., whatever that means), this site has a tremendous amount of important reference material (man pages, original code, etc).

So, eventually we will turn this site into a reference site and keep the reference site available. However, this "conversion to a reference site" is going to happen slower than we originally thought because of some parsing errors we found (we can all thank Scrutinizer for this, looking carefully at code) in the original Discourse Ruby vbulletin.rb script.

Frankly, after working 14 days in a row, 12 hours a day, on this migration, I was disappointed to learn of the errors in the original vbulletin.rb script; but I'm glad we found them and we all owe a debt of gratitude to Scrutinizer for working on modifying the preprocessing routine of the original Discourse vbulletin.rb migration script.

Thank you Scrutinizer!!

Regarding updating the posts:

After we have fully tested the new preprocessing routine on a staging site, we will update the posts on the discourse site. Discourse keeps both the raw (preprocessed) and cooked (post-processed) text for each post in the DB. We will update the raw posts and recook them when it is time to do the rebaking .

Because of this hard line break issue for the "\n" char in code fragments, Scrutinizer is looking at more enhancements to preprocessing at the same time.

Update:

It turns out the plugin recommended by the discourse community, ruby-bbcode-to-md is basically garbage, and completely mangles code in migration.

I want to thank MadeInGermany for finding that bug. It's serious and it's ugly.

The code, as migrated, is unacceptable.

Now, we have to figure out what we are going to do about it.

Personally, I need to sleep on it as I am not a happy camper at the moment.

Update: A Warning to Migrators

Ruby-bbcode-to-md gem is a code mangler

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.