Hi all. I'd like to pitch the idea of migrating this forum to the Discourse forum software (not to be confused with Discord, the live chat software/platform). I find this forum to be slow and clunky, and I have to be very careful when replying to topics to be sure to copy my post before submitting, because there's a good chance Kunena will encounter an error and discard my writing.
Discourse
is one of the most popular and modern forum applications out there. It's used by large open-source projects, like Swift, LLVM, Gnome, and many others. It is open-source, and free if you host it yourself. They also offer paid hosted services, and even offer a free hosted Discourse for "popular" open source projects that I think LinuxCNC would qualify for, but unfortunately does not support importing this old forum. However, there is a
way to migrate
this forum into a self-hosted or paid instance.
IMO its greatest strength is that it uses supports Markdown in posts, making it ideal for a forum such as ours where we’re routinely posting snippets of code and configuration files. It also has a good, free mobile app. And it’s very fluent to use. The UI is responsive and uncluttered.
I would be willing to take on the effort of trialing hosting this forum and migrating the old posts and users, but I would need read-only access to the Kunena DB, attachments, and configuration files. I’ll pay for the VM while I work on this. I figure I run through the import, work out the kinks, let a few people try the new forum, and then we do it all again for real, if we decide we like it.
Thoughts?