Migrating Open Referral's google group to Discourse?

[Greg Bloom]

Hi folks - happy friday. 

I've long been interested in Discourse as an alternative to Google Groups for a range of reasons (including, especially, the ability for people to join and subscribe to specific categories, which would enable much easier subgrouping by geography and areas of interest within the same forum).

Open Referral UK has set up a Discourse for their network and it seems to be working well. I'm talking with Mike Thacker at Porism there about the possibility of merging this forum into that one, and want to float the idea here. Anyone have experience with Discourse, strong opinions one way or another, etc?

If you have any concerns or suggestions (and/or, if this moves forward, if you might be able to help me import our message archive using something like this) please let me know.

Thanks and have a good weekend,

greg

[Paul Mackay]

I think this would be a good move, Discourse has a strong feature set, including categories as you say. +1 from me :)

[Greg Bloom]

Hi again folks! 

So, we finally took a step in this direction: we've worked with the Open Referral UK folks to deploy their forum as the new Open Referral forum, which is now accessible here: https://forum.openreferral.org/ and also via the top-level menu of our website. 

I'm looking into options for migrating messages and also members from this group to that Discourse forum. Not sure it's going to work. We may just need to settle for a searchable archive of this group's messages, which we can build into our documentation. But if you'd like to help with this process let me know. 

For now this is just a soft announcement and gentle encouragement to go to the new forum, create an account if you don't have one, and give me feedback and/or offer any other contributions that can help us step into this new chapter for our community. In the months ahead, I'll take more steps to bring people over and archive this forum. 

thanks so much!

greg