For over a decade, the Jive Software collaborative software has provided our community with a feature rich home for forums, documents, blog posts, and other things. Due to decreased involvement by Jive in Ignite Realtime, sale of Jive Software to Aurea, and other issues “clouding” the future of our Jive cloud instance of this forum, it is time to migrate content to a new platform.
The new platform chosen is the open-source Discourse and you can find our instance here: https://discourse.igniterealtime.org
You can find some technical details on the work being done within our Jira instance: INFRA-12
Migration Timeline
The intention is to make this current forum instance go into a read-only state very soon (next day or so). This will allow for some time to double check the fidelity of the content migration as more users test things out. Hopefully there are no show-stopping bugs with the Discourse instance that would cause us to revert back
Your usernames may have changed
Account details were migrated to the Discourse instance, but there was not a one-to-one conversion of usernames due to some issues I won’t expound upon here. Your email address did directly translate, so when you first attempt to log into Discourse, you will need to reset your password by providing a valid email address used by the current forum instance. We also plan to support Google Authenticator usage, so you can simply use your google account to log in. If you have any doubts that the current account information is correct with regards to your email address, please feel free to directly email me akrherz@gmail.com or stop by our web-based group-chat.
Once you have initially logged in, you should be able to update your account settings and change your username to whatever you wish to use for future logins.
What will happen to community website links?
The plan is to setup a transparent HTTP forwarding of most legacy community website URIs into the proper location within Discourse. So our migration should not break the web
What about RSS feeds, blog feeds, planetjabber, etc?
Indeed, there are some issues to be worked out yet with exactly how we will handle blogs, etc within Discourse. If you are a Discourse expert and want to help out, certainly let us know! There will be a period of whack-a-mole as we workout how this update impacts users and our software, for example the feed of content found on the Openfire Admin Console.
Wait, I don’t like how feature X is setup within Discourse?
Please let us know your thoughts, this is certainly the time to make changes. Something may be currently setup in a matter that is just the default or something that just hasn’t been looked into yet. I certainly do not consider myself an expert with Discourse, with this being my first instance setup!
I would like to thank @Alameyo, @wroot, @Flow, @benjamin and others for their help with getting Discourse up and running. And of course, a big thanks to Surevine for their current sponsorship of Ignite Realtime’s Amazon Web Services presence.
In Closing
I am very thankful to Jive Software for their more than generous support of Ignite Realtime over the years. While the amount of source code written by Jive over the past few years has stopped for Ignite projects, their financial support of Ignite Realtime’s servers and internet hosting remained steadfast. Speaking for @Matt Tucker here, I believe his vision was for Ignite Realtime to mature and become more self sustaining. Recently, a major step toward that goal was taken with the establishment of the Ignite Realtime Foundation and our migration to Amazon Web Services.
Thank you for reading this and your patience as issues are worked out with this migration.