The Cesium Forum is moving to Discourse

[Omar Shehata]

Hey everyone,

We're thrilled to share the biggest update to the forum since its creation: we're migrating from Google Groups to Discourse. 

Discourse is a modern, open source platform that powers a lot of communities, like the Khronos Group discussion forums. 

We plan on moving all forum posts. You'll be able to login to the new forum with the Google account you’re currently using. Other login options will include GitHub and Cesium ion.

With around 2,000 members and over 30,000 posts, the Cesium forum has outgrown our current home. Moving to Discourse will allow us to significantly grow our community and provide a better experience for all users. We'll have:

• Better searchability. The Cesium forum has almost a decade's worth of wisdom with questions and answers about everything Cesium and 3D geospatial. Discourse’s search tools will make it easier to find answers when you need them.

• Better formatting tools. It’ll be easy to embed code-snippets with syntax highlighting, for example.

• Improved UX, especially on mobile. It will have a much nicer look and feel and many modern features like the ability to edit posts.

Here’s our plan for the transition:

• On April 2nd, the new forum will go live at community.cesium.com. 

• The Google Groups forum will remain active through May 1, 2020, but we encourage all new discussions to go on the new forum once it's live. During this time, we’ll continue to check the Google Group to inform users about the move to Discourse.

• On May 2nd, the Google Group will be locked into a read-only mode.

• The Google Group will remain online as an archive to maintain any URLs that link to it.

As the Cesium community continues to grow, this new forum will make it easier to find answers, share your feedback with us and with the wider Cesium ecosystem, and together we can foster more collaboration across the 3D geospatial field as a whole.

[Aristeidis Bampakos]

Awesome news Omar! Looking forward for the new forum :)

[Omar Shehata]

Thanks Aristeidis, me too!

[Mark Erikson]

Out of curiosity, what's the technical process for migrating  the Google Groups posts history over to Discourse?

Also, given that there's going to be a month of overlap, will posts here during that time get migrated over to Discourse as well?

[Omar Shehata]

The actual migration is rather straightforward, we make a dump of all the forum posts and their metadata from Google Groups and that gets imported into the Discourse database. But Google Groups doesn't have like an API for pulling this information so we have to scrape it. Discourse maintains an official script for doing that: https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing-mailing-lists-mbox-listserv-google-groups-emails/79773

Also, given that there's going to be a month of overlap, will posts here during that time get migrated over to Discourse as well?

Posts after Thursday April 2nd will not be migrated. If there's new topics posted here that don't have an answer on the new forum we'll re-post the question and the answer there as needed.

[ohadr.d...@gmail.com]

Out of curiosity, why not StackOverflow?

[Omar Shehata]

StackOverflow is great for Q&A but doesn't easily make space for general discussion, sharing things you're working on, or finding collaborators.

[Mark Erikson]

I see the new forum address is live, but it's asking for logins and I don't see a way to register yet.  Still working on that?

[Omar Shehata]

Yes! The migration is currently underway. We expect it to be open for the public in a couple of hours. 

[Omar Shehata]

The new forum is live! Please give it a try and let us know any issues you find here: https://community.cesium.com/t/welcome-to-the-cesium-community/9217.