Win-Raid -- New Home ! Upgrading forum software and evolving

Hello everyone! I am Wendell and you may know me from Level1Techs. Preserving this community was important to me so I undertook to do what I could to preserve it. We at Level1Techs have been hard at work on a migration to the Discourse forum software, which has taken some time. Sometimes life gets in the way, so it has taken longer than I expected. It is custom forum software we’re on now, and I wanted the conversion to be high fidelity. It was also necessary to bend Discourse to our will a bit to preserve some things the way they are here.

I am very happy with the quality of the conversion data at this point and we are nearly ready to cut over to the new software.

The Hugest of Thanks to @plutomaniac and @Fernando for helping facilitate the preservation. Some aspects of conversion have been tedious! But we’re on the other side of that now.

When we get the go-ahead from the current host the forum will be put into Read Only mode. It could be any day now.

I do not have your passwords, so you will have to use the “forgot password” facility to reset your password. * Use this time to make sure your forum email address is up to date! *

We are doing the work at a new domain, but keeping the Win-Raid name. The win-raid.com domain will redirect to the new site when the conversion is complete and when everything has fully rolled over the win-raid.com domain will continue to work. Special care has been taken to make sure all the old post URLs work, too.

It will take us up to about 8 hours to let the script run once we get the most up-to-date dump of the database powering the forum. After that, it should be smooth sailing.

We are moving to the forum software called Discourse. We are planning some custom plugins for functionality we need, and we plan to update the UI/UX of the forum software after the conversion is complete. In other words, we would like to keep working on and improving the site design and UI/UX for the users after conversion. This is not merely a preservation mission!

Some of you may say “Why not Discord?” Discord is ephemeral. It is not easy to preserve knowledge in Discord. Here… knowledge is for the ages! It’s already here. We are entering an era of computation where user-control of firmware and blobs on their devices is more critical than ever. This is one of the best resources on the net for that kind of thing, and more. The community here is nothing short of amazing and my goal is to make it easy for the community here to do the important work they are doing with the least amount of headache and friction possible.

I am sure that once we cut over there will be many ideas for further improvements and customizations and that sort of thing. Great! If you’re in it to make the community more awesome, welcome, let’s get it done. :slight_smile:

Thank you

Check back this thread – I will update this post and add links when the forum has gone read only and the transfer is in progress. It should not take long!

thank you! and glad to be here!

Wendell

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Congratulations all round on getting the site and its content preserved @wendell



Really grateful to hear this news

This is exciting! Huge thanks to Wendell and his team over at Level1Techs for making all this possible!

There are still a few smaller things to do but, depending on the speed in which our current host facilitates the move, it should happen fairly soon.

Of course, as Wendell said, you’ll be notified when important steps are taken via this thread, so try to check it out whenever you can.

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@wendell
Will this transition of the user account to Level1Techs retain/preserve all Inbox and OutBox Private Messages of the user when it’s finalized?

Or will all user Private Messages be gone and emptied?

If wiped is there a way to download all Private Messages before this happens?

Can your site be made FireFox v52.X compliant?

Your site shows this error message.
An error occurred during a connection to www.level1techs.com. Peer reports incompatible or unsupported protocol version. Error code: SSL_ERROR_PROTOCOL_VERSION_ALERT

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.


2nd error message:
https://forum.level1techs.com/
Unfortunately, your browser is too old to work on this site. Please upgrade your browser to view rich content, log in and reply


Who will be moderating all the Win-Raid forums once it has been successfully migrated to https://www.level1techs.com/ ?


Yes, AFAIK everything will be migrated. Wendell can verify, of course.


Once again, you’re basically asking if someone wants to back-port (or even consider) support for a 20+ years old OS like Windows XP. The answer is obviously no, huge security and incompatibility concerns.


To be decided, migrating is the most important thing for now. I’ll be one of the moderators for sure.

Thank you !

YEEEEEEEHAW! I am very excited for this!



Although, in honor of the old software, I have bricked my main PC purposefully.



Will there be a new 2-step email verification feature?



I am not sure if we’ll get private messages in the dump or not! We didn’t in the test dump. But if we do, then I will bring those over as well. If not best to save what you need from private messages.

the new system has private messaging and even group private messaging, so it will be much nicer.

>Discourse

NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE

---- DISCOURSE. If this forum is seriously moving to Discourse i’m going to get my account GDPRed. Anything but that cancerous PajeetScript laden ----ware.

Nevermind the fact L1T taking over the forums, yuck.

EDIT: And where the hell is this “Contact Form” located in the Privacy Policy? That’s not very GDPR compliant or is it huh?

[edit by plutomaniac: offensive language removed per Rules]

@Deleted User

If you would like your account to be deleted and the content anonymized, send a request to the forum-related inquires email found at Privacy/FAQ/Imprint page.

EDIT: Done

Looking at Discourse, I think it would be stable software to run this forum. Although it would make us look more like the Roblox Devforum, it has many integrations and has a lot of compatibility with older systems/browsers, and a lot of website add-ons to choose from. And @wendell , thank you for preserving this community!

just a question do i need to recreate my account when the migration finishes? can i reuse my existing password and email? will forum attachments and images be saved? these files look very important

also please use the same classic win-raid theme on the new forum if possible the default discourse theme seems too modern-ish i prefer the old forum layout god bless and happy 2022 everybody hope everything goes well

no, everything will be carried over


Nope, will be transferred


As the OP says, all passwords need to be reset. Make sure your user email is valid.


Yeap


For now, migration of data is the most important. The rest will be a work in progress, but doable for sure.


You can select "Categories" and it will appear fairly similar. Again, these are WIP.

Thank you Wendell, Plutomaniac and Fernando for taking the steps to preserve the library of hardware and software. I wish all the best for everyone of us. Looking forward.

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Will migration have a problem if we already have a Level1 forum account with matching username and email address?

I actually want to know something close in relation to this as well.

I use a different email for every site I sign up to, and in this case 2 different usernames, is it possible to merge them after the jump?
Current L1T forum member.

If anything can be done here or there to get PM’s downloadable that would be great, some messages I have had with those who are no longer with us.

Edit by Fernando: Formatting of the quoted post repaired

i have an L1T account, uses same email, good question

The winraid setup will essentially continue to be its own site, just new forum software. Not a merger or anything per se. We could do that in the future.

> I use a different email
Even if we were to merge at some point in the future, you can still run two different emails on one forum (with two different usernames).

So I don’t anticipate any problems of account overlap. We’ll setup an email link or help form though just in case anyone has any trouble resetting their password though.

@Wendell


Hello Wendell,

Sorry, had a bunch of questions saved for posting later and the DSL internet has been down due to an ATT network issue and a final brunt of income tax filings for the first time for yesterday’s deadline completed so was unable to post further questions till now which ATT restored today.

Is Level1Techs still running off of Drupal v7.0 that was released in 2011?

If so will the migrated Win-Raid forum also be running on Drupal v7.0 on its own separate server?

[Looks like you recently sort of answered this question about separate sites just recently before I had a chance to post this…]
After the migration is complete will Win-Raid and Level1Techs still continue to use their own separate website addresses as it is now when the user is logging in?

Where will we go after the migration to login to the Win-Raid account? Will you be resetting your migrated Win-Raid account at anmeldung.php or at https://forum.level1techs.com/?

Are Win-Raid migrated user accounts usable only on the Win-Raid site and not the Level1Tech site or is it a shared user account on both sites meaning one account can log into either site?

If logging in to the migrated Win-Raid forums will you be logging in at the Level1Techs home page or login at Win-Raid as we are currently?

Since the migrated Win-Raid will maintain its own site will there be a way to use Win-Raid site’s traditional login page style and the same Win-Raid protocol TSL 1.2 compliant TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 cypher?

For your Level1Tech site, is there any way for you to add TSL 1.2 Cypher minimum fallback protocol support currently supported at about 95% of all websites?

Will each site (Win-Raid and Level1Tech) still maintain their own independent user accounts meaning after the migration of the Win-Raid account will only have access to the Win-Raid forums and will need to create a separate Level1Tech account in order to access Level1Tech forums?

Will all posts and threads from Win-Raid that have migrated to Level1Techs server preserve the “thread creator’s name”, “original creation dates”, and “thread last modified dates” in the thread title as it is on Win-Raid now or will it look similar to the Level1Techs current forum message design and details style?

After the transfer of the forum posts to Level1Techs’s Win-Raid server, can the original owner/OP/creator of the that Win-Raid thread still be able to delete their thread page or modify the thread title and update the the contents of that thread page despite the age of the post which could be a few weeks or years?

Are there any newer features or access control that the owner/op/creator of a thread or post will have that the content management system Xobor lacks and Drupal has that you can mention as an improvement from this migration?

After the migration is complete can all previous older posts (not threads) made on Win-Raid by the original poster still be modified or deleted by that same user or will all Win-Raid migrated posts (not threads) be frozen and unalterable once migrated to the Level1Tech’s Win-Raid server and only possible for post migrated new posts?

Have all the BIOS Modding Threads/Posts been migrated yet which seem to be the core of preserving?

Are the Win-Raid forums being fully downloaded entirely first before the conversion migration process or are you processing the threads one at a time as you go and if so can you demo a small Win-Raid thread publicly that has been converted with (read only access)?

For posts/threads that included file attachments can you retain the same ability to download these files as a public guest without needing to login to the site? At the moment Win-Raid allows any public guest viewer to read posts and even download file attachments without needing an account to log in.

Is there an ETA of how long it would take to migrate the entire Win-Raid forum or a status of what has been migrated so far?


Thank you Wendell.