As we’re gearing up for 2020, it’s time for HostBalls to graduate and take a step forward. I’m toying with a wild idea, but I want your thoughts. Let me prepare you for the idea first, share with you my thought process, and see where you sit.
My thought is that while we’ve done some great things here, it’s not too late to reinvent ourselves. We can rename, we can move from Discourse. The data sets of Discourse are nearly impossible to move, the beta branch is better supported by the devs than the stable branch on Discourse, and our DB schema has changed a lot since the last “stable” release. So those two+ year old plugins that claim to be able to perform migrations, that ain’t happening.
Can we do something crazy enough to work? Can we reinvent ourselves with a fresh database, archive HB to a subdomain (and redirect the root domain to the new one), and blow up in a whole new way for 2020? Am I crazy or do you think we can pull it off?
While I appreciate your idea of improving and starting over, I like things how they are over here. I don’t really need HB to become yet more similar to LET/LES (adapting to how these are in terms of forum software, user count, popularity). In fact I enjoy these two and HB separately for what they are. For HB that means few but cool and helpful people always lending an open ear for issues and happy to jump to help out (e.g. when I was trying to exchange the SSD in my old laptop, or @Wolveix encouragement in Ympkit making it something I could never imagine having made by myself ) or open for not so LET/LES-ish topics like working out, Divi Theme etc.
Just my two cents though. Whatever shall happen to HB, will happen
I’d say exploring ideas on what the potential new system would be great. Is the new version on Xenforo? NodeBB?
What’s the limitations of making a database migration?
Not having a general idea on what the newer version (I understand it’s a blank canvas) would be great. No details about it brings uncertainty and therefore I foresee many people being reserved in their decision to keep things the way they are.
I’d say if we can find a migration path to 2.0 with the current content as well then that’d be great.
I like discourse. The only “scrolling” issue I have is occasionally I forget that I don’t need to scroll to the top of the page to click the logo (despite it being there all the time) to reload the homepage.
Unless you’re not happy with the content or visitors, I don’t see what changing the name/platform would achieve? That’s not to say you might not like the current visitors, but are perhaps concerned the site is “missing out” on potential visitors due to name and/or platform?
If you are looking at options of changing, it needs to be a full change - ie a replacement. Archiving under a subdomain might be useful, but IMO if you’re going down the route of changing it just change it. Setup some redirects and if possible migrate user accounts.
Discourse feels a lot more polished to me, but NodeBB is still a great choice. Personally, I would prefer to stick with Discourse, but I’ll embrace the change either way
