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11-01-2017, 01:50 PM
#30
Artashes is offline Artashes
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Originally Posted by Big Zee View Post
Hope you manage to pull off the transformation Artashes. I also occasionally pop by here to see if TF has risen from the ashes. I agree with a lot of what you have said about forums and their decline in general - you only really need to look at vBulletin as a company to see how forums in that traditional format have fallen into decline. I think you still have the core of a solid community here though, and the people who occasionally pop back to see what has happened are testament to that. I think one of the hardest parts to getting any community off the ground is getting that good initial core - but I think you still have that, so you should use it.

Your honest thoughts on why you believe your initial TF transition failed is interesting, but in the world of IT I think it happens all the time - one thing I have learnt is to never give any expected dates with regards to IT projects!
Originally Posted by SenseiSteve View Post
I was just telling one of my friends that TalkFreeLance used to be an amazing forum. I'm certainly looking forward to it's rebirth.
@Big Zee and @SenseiSteve, thank you both for your words of encouragement.

The reason why the transition failed half-way (I say half-way because initial transition was successful, in terms of filtering and cleaning the database), are strangest technical complications with the migration itself. We've installed Discourse a few times on a test server, but something doesn't work once migration is performed: either the server becomes unresponsive, or suddenly everything gets erased, for an unexplained reason. I had two developers that specialize in forum software tackle the issue, including one that is officially recommended by Discourse itself. Initially we thought there was an issue with Ruby, then the fact that we lacked server RAM to run it properly. Both were addressed reasonably, but various errors still appear.

To give ourselves the best fresh chance, I found a brand new technology partner www.iozoom.com that is kindly providing the community with a powerful and fully managed Cloud VPS. In the next few days we'll be moving to a brand new server, after which we will give it more attempts. The community itself has been ready for the move and we've been in that migration state since, but I am not going to release something half-baked or with no confidence that the software will run well. I need the developers to be completely happy with that notion first.

And I completely agree. I usually don't like predicting, thus I realize I shot myself in the foot by giving an expectation date and/or time frame. What keeps the fire alive though is knowing that the core community here still believes and looks forward to changes. Trust me, I really want this to happen as well, and not only because of time and resources that I continue to invest in this effort.

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