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Hi everyone,

We have exciting news! As per the note here , we have been preparing to move the wikiHow Forums to move to Discourse. The initial testing and integration is complete, and we are now preparing for the big move!

We originally thought that we might not be able to move every thread over from Vanilla to Discourse, but now it looks like we can. So there are no decisions to be made there, which is a huge bonus!

We did talk previously about the ability to flag posts, and after checking with admins, we will leave that functionality in, so anyone can report an inappropriate post. 

So here’s the low-down on the next steps of the process: 

  1. The current forums will be going into read-only mode at around 4pm Tuesday PT (you can find what time that is in your time zone here )
  2. Our wikiHaus engineers will take a final copy of the forums and pass it to the Discourse engineers.
  3. Discourse will run a script to migrate all of the forum posts into the new platform. 
  4. We will do some testing to check everything is working as expected.
  5. We will move the URL of the Vanilla forums to another.
  6. We will point the Discourse forums to forums.wikihow.com/
  7. The new forums will open! 

We expect the full process to take around 2-3 hours from start to finish, but of course, this is just an estimate :) 

You will need to log in to the forums using your wikiHow details, but after you’ve logged in once, you won’t need to log in again unless you log out of the forums or the wikiHow main site. 

After we go live, it might take some time to get used to everything! Some of the layout and functionality is different, but we’ll do our best to help guide you along the way. 

We’ve also created a form for after we go live, in case you see a bug and want to report it. This will be the best place to post anything, rather than in the forums themselves. You can find the form here (you might want to bookmark it before the day of!): forms.gle/m3Z8SsszvyDbvKzeA

I’m so excited! 

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Hooray! This change will take some getting used to, but some of these new features seem really neat! Will this post also transfer to the new forums, so we can have the bug report link still? I’d bookmark the form, but I can’t do that on mobile (which is always what I use for wikiHow/the forums), so I’ll probably need the link:stuck_out_tongue:

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Yes, this post will be there! So long as you can get in, that is :D 

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Huzzah! I can’t wait!

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Hooray!!! I normally don’t go on the forums late at night (the move will be later in the evening where I am) so this is super convenient!!

7

Yay! This is so exciting!

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Cool! Looking forward to it!

9

Can we see a preview on what the new forums are going to look like?  This sounds very exciting!

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@Awesome-Aasim Helpie found this:  discourse.org/a/img/customers/media_cartalk-1x.jpg

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I think a sneak peek is a fair request :) 

This is without any posts imported, so ignore the content, and no guarantees it will look exactly like this, but:

front page:  share.getcloudapp.com/E0uzRNvN

and

thread:  share.getcloudapp.com/GGuoJbgb

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Wow, it looks great!

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Ooh, it looks amazing! (And Jayne, you should get some rest! :D)

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This sounds amazing nice job!:smiley:

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Ooooo, just had a look at the sneak peak, very nice!!

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Cool. Is it because of the internal server error?

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Oooh…Waiting…Discourse? WOWeeeeee!

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Um Jayne, one question (it’s dumb, but still). I currently have 1,311 forum notifications, and will that be transferred over, too? I have a special liking to enormous amounts of notifications. :D 

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I am impressed.  This looks a lot cleaner.  One thing I probably want though is a dark mode in the forums, if that is possible.  Maybe one day, as Anna would say!

Hey, that rhymes.

20

yeah. I too want a dark mode in forums.

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I like that! It looks very clean and organized.