Force Academy

With the understanding that no posts and content from here will be lost with the move to FA2020, how do people feel about their content here? We have a number of options, some more expensive and time consuming to admin than others. Please answer the poll below and comment.

Keep in mind that we will be undergoing a major shift in how the site works. The FA2020 site will have much less "forumy" things. There is a Forum, with three very board categories for general discussion and intros ( https://fa2020.forceacademy.us/index.php/forum ), but a lot of the emphasis is on the Groups, which have their own discussion and sharing mechanism. So, say, the DA won't be a category on the forum, it's a Group, much like on Facebook, where members interact. So it's a shift in thinking away from all activity being in discussion forums, and more to the social media mindset of comment walls and friends and following. For an example of the DA in this new model, check out: https://fa2020.forceacademy.us/index.ph ... ark-aspect

For me, I don't mind, say, topic threads being available to read through on the FA2020 site, and new threads created in the new forum there.

I'm assuming here that the difficulty moves from most difficult (for admin) being the first option and least difficult (for admin) being the last. Would this be correct?

Although I have looked around the 2020 site I'm having trouble visualizing how longer threads that have been here will look.

Initially, my preference would be to have option 1, but that option comes with a lot of assumption on how it would look and respond. So, assuming that option would be time consuming and expensive, and might not even give the results I picture or prefer. I have trouble choosing a good course of action.

Other than the private Shadow Training with active journals, I'm not sure how much the method matters. The easiest automated version probably makes the most sense.

For planning purposes, as I will want to pull Shadow things down to my own computer, when are you planning on shutting down these forums permanently?

The options are indeed listed in order of most difficult/costly to least difficult/free.

If you go to TotJO and look at their forums, it looks like that. That should give you long threads to see in the wild. The forum software company also uses their own forums, with a different theme, and that's viewable here: https://www.kunena.org/forum/index

As for when these forums will shut down, once the new site is up and in place, I can simply turn this board read-only and leave it up for however long people need. I would prefer to transfer posts over and shut this one down eventually, but I'm not in a huge hurry to.

There is just not an easy way to transfer users and posts over to Joomla due to incompatibility between databases and password hashes.

Is there a way to download/merge/“choose techie term here” our journals? That’s all I really care about personally, and maybe others as well. I put some of my insights here and I would hate to lose them.

That's the hard way. You won't lose anything, it's just a matter of how to move them. Right now, the best way is to spend an afternoon copy and pasting posts over, which would mean your posts are owned by you on the new site. These boards will remain up and available until everyone has what they need from them.

It's sort of a matter of who will do the work: me or you. I have not found a quick way to merge the database entries.

For my journals I'm planning on turning them into PDF's, downloading them and starting a new Journal at the new site. Basically the same thing I did in the move from the old site to here.