TSC Subcommittee Meeting (22 Apr 2021): Migrate forum.stackstorm.com

[blag]

April 2021 @StackStorm/tsc 1 hour meeting will take place on Thursday, 22th Apr 2021, 09:30 AM US Pacific.
See #33 for more info about how to join.

Agenda

Migrating forum.stackstorm.com

• We're on 50% FOSS plan for forum.stackstorm.com for Discourse
  • Consider switching to self-hosted Discourse (free, maintenance burden)
  • Consiser switching to GH Discussions (free, zero maintenance, integrates with our GH community)
• Keep SEO in mind
• Owner + 1 needed to: research, propose a plan, execute the migration

Deliverables

• A plan to migrate to the new discussion host provider
• A plan (or not) for what to do with the old Discourse forums (forum.stackstorm.com)
• A delegate responsible for overseeing the migration
  • Need greater access on GitHub?
  • Need access to credentials in 1Password?
• A timeline for the work to be done

[blag]

• Discourse's free program will not work for us because we cannot use our own forum.stackstorm.com subdomain
• Investigate migrating to the self-hosted version of Discourse
• Enabling GitHub Discussions in st2 repository - @armab
• Turn on a banner in the Discourse forums to direct people to post in the new GitHub Discussions
• Investigate exporting all current posts (called "topics") on the forum to GitHub Pages
  • Write and run script to dump current topics to a format that GitHub Pages can read
  • Ensure current topic links don't break (eg: forum.stackstorm.com/t/<topic_slug>/<topic_id>)
    • Repository named t so the GitHub Pages site is at stackstorm.github.io/t
    • Use DNS to redirect forum.stackstorm.com to stackstorm.github.io
    • So all current topic links would still be the same
    • Would lose out on user profile links (eg: forum.stackstorm.com/u/...)

Current plan (assuming all investigations pan out):

• Start using GitHub Discussions in st2 repository
• Make current Discourse forums read-only
• Migrate forums posts/topics to GitHub Pages (with a repository named t)
• Use DNS to point forum.stackstorm.com to stackstorm.github.io for backwards compatibility

[arm4b]

The Github Q/A was set up at: https://github.com/StackStorm/st2/discussions
Feel free to adjust, edit or add any new Categories.

It's interesting that it's possible to convert an existing Issue to a Question.
Example: StackStorm/st2#5181

We could do that for a bunch of other existing StackStorm Issues: https://github.com/StackStorm/st2/labels/question

[blag]

Thanks for taking care of that!

Yeah, it will be much nicer to separate questions and discussions out from feature requests and bug reports. 😄

[punkrokk]

For the future: https://letswp.io/download-discourse-forum-wget/

[arm4b]

Superseded by the #89 plan.