Since we just had issues with a #Discourse upgrade AGAIN on the OctoPrint community forums (the admin team is trying to fix things up as I'm typing this), does anyone here have experience with migrating from Discourse to #NodeBB by any chance?
Seriously considering a future move right now. We've had nothing but bad experiences with their "official supported way" of doing a self-hosted setup, and I feel really bad for the admins.
@lewiscowles1986 Vendor lock in. Too inflexible. As the central searchable knowledge hub and communication platform, this needs to be 100% under the project's control.
Yes, we also have a discord, but that's not any of the above and doesn't in any way or shape replace or provide what the forum does.
@lewiscowles1986 I know, I've been running community.octoprint.org for half a decade now, and self hosted since early 2019* (with the help of some kickass admins) 😅
@foosel Not with Discourse but we moved the pfSense/Netgate forum from SMF to NodeBB and the transition went a lot better than I expected. NodeBB seems to run pretty well (but took some tuning to get there). I don't hear our IT crew complaining much about NodeBB so I can only assume it isn't a horrible pain to maintain.
@jimp Especially updates have been an absolute nightmare for our admin team, with psql migrations going wrong, and the latest thing now is a ton of user accounts being deactivated, and permission issues on the images (root:root, wtf).
If the IT crew has so far had smoother sailing than that with NodeBB it could already be worth it 😅
@foosel I think the hardest part was figuring out the scaling of it. It takes a lot more resources than SMF ever did but that said, I don't know how Discourse is in that regard so it may not be a comparable situation.
I helped with our initial migration to NodeBB and I do recall some quirks with attachment locations and permissions but it's been a few years and I can't remember the details so they must not have been too traumatic.
@jimp That certainly sounds like it. I can remember a bunch of times now that poop hit the fan during upgrades and I only was an innocent bystander and still got vivid memories containing a bunch of expletives.
@foosel The more I think about it, I think we had problems with old attachments after migrating. New attachments were fine. I can't recall if we worked around that or just let the old ones go.
That may only be a problem with SMF->NodeBB conversion. At the time, that path was not well maintained and we had to migrate to an older NodeBB version and then upgrade from there to something current.
Hopefully someone with more info specific to Discourse conversion can comment with more relevant info.
@devnull@jimp Around 800k Pageviews per month averaged over the year (more during the northern hemisphere's winter, less during its summer - 3d printing interesting is seasonal ^^). 2.5k user visits per month. The forum acts as the FAQ, so a LOT of anonymous visits are coming in directly from OctoPrint instances or via search engines and such.
Officially this is my first vacation day today, but once I'm back in the office without an emergency going on, ok if I ping you on potential costs?
@foosel Of course! I'll be around when you get back, please do reach out. We'd love to get you on NodeBB :) Judging by those numbers you should probably still be good to go on a smaller server, but we can always bump up resources as needed.
@foosel More than happy to be kept in the loop. Since #OctoPrint is open source we may be able to help you out with migration at cost (or cover completely with hosting, but I imagine you want to self host?)
@devnull not 100% set on self-hosting, but we went self-hosted when the traffic got too much for Discourse's Open Source Support plan thingy and the alternative was several hundred dollars per month, and I fear that might be an issue with y'all as well possibly 😅
We are currently mostly interested in learning IF there's a straightforward migration option to begin with. Posts, accounts, etc. We are also concerned about direct links to threads.
Add comment