I have found many times valuable information on these forums, and it’s really sad that a lot of it will be gone forever once the Discourse transition is over. It’s like deleting a part of Blender’s history.
There are many useful topics that could get deleted.
So…let’s think of a plan to save this website. I guess there are softwares that could crawl the whole website, consisting of tens of terabytes of data. If some members have servers with enough storage to host it, it would be nice to create a backup. They could even start a crowdfunding campaign, if costs are a problem.
I don’t know what are the monthly fees to sustain this website, nor the daily users average number, but for an archive, I guess that costs would be greatly reduced.
We don’t know when the transition will start, but the sooner the crawling starts, the better will be, since we’ll be able to save more.
What do you think ? How could such a plan be achieved ?
It would be madness to delete the stuff from the site. There is an immense wealth of advice and useful stuff here. I’ve found this site more useful than tutorials for learning blender. I hope your concerns are ill founded.
The best thing they can do is keep the old site as a read-only archive, as Johnathon W mentioned the issue of trying to move all of BA’s data to the new software if and when it does happen (due to the sheer amount of it).
Of course, the switch is way behind the date they originally thought it might happen, we might still have this site for the foreseeable future of it’s on the same timescale as the new Blender keymap (which is being done by the same guy).
The site is not going away, just the forum software is changing from VBulletin to Discourse
From the link i the original post.
The current plan is to archive all threads from Vbulletin (so they’re still readable) and start fresh with Discourse
Note that for most threads that have been inactive for more than 12 months, that are automatically closed so not all threads need be transferred to any new forum.
The forum has changed in the past (both in name and appearance) so no reason to get hysterical
