In the face of the efforts of @mcdanlj to port other communities to a discourse instance hosted at http://forum.makerforums.info I feel I would be remiss in not following up if that is an acceptable relocation for this community instead of a dedicated self-hosted forum?
Google login has been enabled on that self-hosted instance of Discourse, and the code that is used for the import is available (I thought I saw a github link at some point) so we aren’t “locked in” on a proprietary platform as was the concern raised by some in the initial poll.
I’m still writing code for the actual import, which has not been performed yet, and the code will be available to anyone who wants to use it under GPL (since that’s the license for Discourse). I’m happy to share work-in-progress code with anyone who asks.
All the other code I’ve written (for the static archive site) is CC-BY 4.0, intentionally extremely liberal.
Using google login on the http://forum.makerforums.info site will allow you to own — including editing — the posts imported from Google+, as long as you do it at least once.
That doesn’t force you to continue to use Google login; Discourse seems to have pretty good support for merging accounts together so you can change to some other authentication provider and still own all your posts going forward. It’s really a pretty good system.
I don’t know if we can say voting is in yet, but given the split I think it’s really an on the fence decision. Would a dedicated support forum on the thing printer website, while the community aspect joins the makerforum.info community be an acceptable compromise?
I don’t mean to suggest that it should be done for my sake. I’d be happy to create a category at makerforums into which the existing posts can be imported, without implying that a dedicated support forum is a bad idea. There will also be tags and the ability to search by tags, making it easy to view by Revolve, Replicape, Redeem, etc.
I updated because I had previously indicated that the import was likely to happen and that I was working at it, but that’s very different from saying that I’ve succeeded at coding and am ready to start doing actual imports. I know how to do this now.
I suggest that this import into makerforums replaces at least the function of the static import I built for this community as a quick hack jekyll site. It’s better from a personal information perspective because it intrinsically gives people control over their information in a way that is much harder with a static site. That feels like a responsible way to handle personal information.
Ok - I think we’re close enough to the deadline that I’m going to suggest that @mcdanlj goes ahead and imports the Thing-Printer G+ community to makerforums (if possible giving us a dedicated subsection in the 3D printing topic?). In the meantime I’ll be nagging @Elias_Bakken until we have a proper support forum instance setup on http://thing-printer.com. We will try to also let the support forum use the Google authentication, so nobody will need to create a dedicated account anywhere if they don’t have/want to.
