Migrating to Vanilla Forums

[Jeff Verkoeyen]

Hey everyone,

We're going to be going through a metamorphosis over the next few months. The Three20 community is going to be moved to a customized Vanilla forums installation running on Three20.info. It's already up and running, so go ahead and check it out:

http://forums.three20.info/

Features that are cool, better, or new:

• Thread voting ala Stack Overflow. The best answers bubble to the top.
• Moderators - I'll be tapping some shoulders soon into the migration.
• Code syntax highlighting. We're using the same syntax highlighter found on Three20.info. Earlier today I pushed a change to the syntax highlighter that makes it possible to view API docs for any TT* object presented in source without any additional markup.
  See a demo here: http://forums.three20.info/discussion/9/read-before-posting-a-discussion
• Post styling with Markdown.
• Customization with Github. So far I've made it possible to specify your Github handle in your profile. In the future, I want to be able to autolink to issues and commits with SHA1s on Github.
• Discussion tagging.
• User accounts: signatures, avatars, post counts, and all that good stuff.
• Much better moderation tools.
• Structured categories. Places for people to rant or laugh.

Features that we already had:

• Email notifications when new posts are made. This is for those who still prefer an email digest of the community's activities.

Features we're going to lose:

• Being able to ask questions by simply sending an email. This is a tough one because I know some people prefer this method. Perhaps in the future we could write a mod for Vanilla that would allow us to send an email to for...@three20.info and have it post to the discussions.

As for the Google Groups, we're going to continue supporting the Google Group until at least April 9th of 2011. At that point we will assess the migration and re-evaluate our decision.

Again, the web address for the forums is:

http://forums.three20.info/

If you have any questions about this migration, whether you think the whole idea stinks or you have suggestions for improvement, respond to this email or post a message to the forums, respectively.

This is the forum discussion we'll be using to organize any questions about the migration.

http://forums.three20.info/discussion/10/migration-from-google-groups-to-vanilla

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Cheers,

- Jeff