Migrate to Discourse (help requested)

Hi all,

I recently came across an offer by Discourse for free hosting for
popular open source projects
(https://blog.discourse.org/2016/03/free-discourse-forum-hosting-for-community-friendly-github-projects/),
and I’m happy to report that we got approved. I think this would be a
very nice replacement for the SourceForge mailing list (and maybe we
can also use it for user support and reduce our reliance on the Zotero
forums). I guess we could also move to GitHub-only communication, but
I think a separate platform like Discourse is still useful for
high-importance/low-volume discussions with a wider audience.

We should be able to migrate the xbiblio-devel mailing list archive,
but the Discourse folks told me that we can’t do the migration on
their hosted copy. However, we could migrate our mailing list content
into a development instance of Discourse, export a Discourse data
backup, and have the Discourse folks apply that to their hosted
instance.

I was hoping somebody would be willing to assist me with this
migration. I can supply an mbox file for the xbiblio-devel SourceForge
mailing list archive
(https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mailing%20List%20Archives/).
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md
has instructions for installing Discourse locally or on a cloud
instance. https://meta.discourse.org/t/problem-importing-using-mbox-script/37567
has a discussion of a successful SourceForge mailing list migration.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/howto-import-mbox-mailing-list-files/51233
has general instructions on using the standard mbox import script at
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/import_scripts/mbox.rb.

Best,

Rintze

Hi Rintze,

I agree with you that we should avoid GitHub-only communication. GitHub is for issues for not for general discussion/support/help.

I had a look at the install instructions and the import script. Looks pretty doable. If you like, I can try to do the migration.

Cheers,
Michel

Thanks to everyone who made this happen!

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