The Solved plugin would be a great addition to the Help category.
Here’s an example of it in use on another discussion forum.
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I’m in favor of this. I haven’t ever added plugins but I’m happy to look into it this weekend. Thanks for the heads up!
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Might be worth holding off on that, as I’ve just heard back from Discourse that our application for free hosting has been accepted, and we have a hosted instance for us at https://purescript.discourse.group.
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I will definitely hold off then. Will they migrate our data?
(Don’t go and sign up there right away though - if we end up using that, we will restore from a backup of this instance so everything will be brought across automatically)
Yep! I just got this email back from them:
Your application has been accepted, you can access your new community at purescript.discourse.group, you should see an admin invite in your e-mail to help you get set up.
If you want, you could also restore conversations from your other self-hosted instance to this new one, we’d have to help you with this though. To do this, you’d take a backup from https://discourse.purescript.org/ and upload it to https://purescript.discourse.group/ and share the backup name here. I’ll then proceed to restore it for you and once done, you can carry on conversations on your new community as before.
Do let us know what you think and if there is anything else we can help you with.
@thomashoneyman if you want you could sign up there, I’ll make you an admin, and then you could put this instance into readonly mode, make a backup from this instance, and upload it there? Then I can let them know that the backup is uploaded and they can restore it for us. Also would you be able to set up a redirect from discourse.purescript.org to purescript.discourse.group?
I don’t believe I have access to anything DNS related. I saw Phil’s note on Twitter about turning the resources over, but at the moment I believe I just have the info for the box running Discourse.
I’ve joined the new instance.
Nice! I didn’t mean via DNS, I meant via an HTTP redirect.
Will everyone need to sign up again?
I don’t think so, I think the backup should include all of the existing users as well as the conversations. (I imagine that backing up the conversations without also including information about who said what wouldn’t be particularly useful.) I’m only asking Thomas to sign up now because they want us to get the backup to them via the admin interface.
Come to think of it, I think we should probably make a dedicated thread for this to give people some advance notice before we do the move?
We’d still want purescript.discourse.org to point to purescript.discourse.group, though, right? I’d imagine that we’d end up stopping the server after the transition is complete.
@hdgarrood The backup is uploaded to the new Discourse and their team can restore it. However, if we want to alert that we’re transitioning on a specific day then I can do a new backup on that day.
I just realized that we’d have to use the https://purescript.discourse.group domain name rather than our https://discourse.purescript.org domain if we switch. I like having a custom domain name for our official Discourse instance. That’s something to weigh against the advantages of having the instance managed for us altogether. So far the maintenance burden has been minimal, which makes me hesitate a little on this.
Can we use the CNAME DNS record type to allow us to keep using the discourse.purescript.org while having the browser resolve the host in the background to purescript.discourse.group? I recall how exactly that DNS type works or if it’s a different type?
No, because of SSL. It would only work if the Discourse folks were prepared to configure their server specifically for us, because the web server would need to be able to present a valid SSL certificate for that domain, otherwise the browser would refuse to connect. I expect we would have to upgrade to their Standard option to keep using the domain discourse.purescript.org, which would be $50/mo. I was chatting with @thomashoneyman just now and we think we’d actually prefer to stay self hosting in order to keep the current domain name for the time being
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