Blender Artists 2.0: We’re Moving to Discourse!
Long in the planning, (three years now!) we finally move BlenderArtists to a new forum platform: Discourse. This change coincides with a change in ownership: after the switch, CG Cookie is transferring the ownership and management of BlenderArtists to BlenderNation.
Jonathan Williamson writes:
From day one we have tried to be good stewards of the community but in the last few years we’ve been unable to dedicate the time that Blender Artists deserves and needs. Thankfully, Bart has graciously agreed to step up and take ownership through BlenderNation. Bart is one of the original Not a Number crew and was responsible for many of the original Blender tutorials that many of us (myself included) first learned from. Blender Artists could not be in better hands.
Jason van Gumster (Fweeb) will stay involved as the lead moderator. The migration and this crowdfunding campaign are being run by BlenderNation.
The data migration is complex and involves hiring a professional to help us migrate the data. We can’t do this without raising some funds. For a full migration of the entire site we need €4500, if we raise less, we’ll import less history accordingly.
Read more about why we’re switching to Discourse and our campaign goals on the Kickstarter campaign page.
Glad to hear that it goes to your hands, Bart! Thank you for all you doing! :)
It’s always my pleasure and honour to help this community :)
Bart Congratulations and keep up the great work. I have been fallowing and using your tutorials since I began with Blender 3 years ago. Thank you and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for Blender!
Thanks Brian, I appreciate it :)
Thanks, Bart! I couldn’t imagine the community in better hands.
Thanks man :)
Really looking forward to have proper search & notifications in the BA forums!! Thank you all for volunteering your time to take care of the community!
You’ll get both :)
Congratulations!
One quick question: wil there be a “subscribed” link to see in a list all the threads that one has marked as interesting? It’s a handy feature of BA forum i use all the time to keep track of new posts in the thread I like
I believe so, I’d have to look into it more. For one, you can use the search function (see screenshot), but there may be an easier way to access this. There’s also a ‘bookmark’ feature to collect topics of interest.
Good to hear you are the new steward, Bart. I’m sure you and Jason (and others) will do a great job with BA in its new home.
Why such short campaign period?
New forum looks awesome! Can’t wait to use it.
Good luck!
It’s only a small budget, I feel that if we can’t raise that in 14 days, we won’t be able to raise it in 30 either. Plus, I’m eager to get this going :)
This is just so great news!
Mr Sorbias, your tutorials on YouTube are amazing by the way!
Oh, thank you! :) I think I will make a video also about this Kickstarter thing if it seems that we can’t reach the target.
Bart my man, you’re awesome, thanks!
Maybe if you can’t reach the goal try this: https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing-from-vbulletin-4/.
I’m aware there are scripts, but this migration is huge and complex – that’s why I hired an expert to help us. If we can’t reach the goal, I won’t be trying it myself.
What’s so different about blenderartists and any other vBulletin installation? I don’t get that “complex” part. I understand that it is big one but after all it’s all about import/export and this is partially automated task. Only “complex” thing I can see is that this will be time consuming (transfers).
It’s 15+ years of data, there are likely corrupted parts. It needs installation of a Discourse development environment, pushing of content to S3,… All things that I don’t have the knowledge or bandwidth for. This needs to be done properly by someone who knows what he’s doing :)
Still nothing complex there :) I’ll just tell you as a professional – this price is a total rip-off. Sad that community will take that on itself.
One other thing: the CG Cookie crew looked into migrating it themselves using the available scripts and gave up in the end.
That is great news, Bart! I just pledged for Gold, looking forward to the new version. Good luck! :D
Thanks Gustav!
Hey, that’s a cool development! Congrats, Bart!
Thanks Metin!
Congratulations!
My advice : don’t migrate it ;) the important stuff will come back anyway!
I kinda agree AND disagree with you. BA is full of old useless stuff that nobody would miss but some relevant stuff (like discussions and links) would be lost. Migrating is good idea and I believe that a mobile friendly UI with modern features like DIscourse have will help to engage the community.
It was a joke. But I couldn’t resist to write that ;)
if possible some clean up are needed on very old threads
many have lost images , files , links
so not very useful anymore !
I guess that would save HD memory too
only one suggestion
have a better search engine!
Congratulations! & good luck
happy bl
That would be nice, but with over 300,000 topics to review we’d need to let the community help with that. Perhaps they could flag expired thread for removal or so…
Some forums archive threads (you cannot comment any more) with the last comment being 1 year old.
Would’t it be a good filter for you to only migrate threads with younger than 1-2-3 years LAST comments?
Wow, the target is reached in just 3 days! :)
I mean, at least the Kickstarter target. The full migration seems to be 4500.
Thanks Bart for all the great work you’re doing on BlenderNation. And thanks for accepting this new responsibility to do even more. Good Job! Keep it up!