On September 24th, community.lsst.org will go into read-only mode for the day because major changes are afoot!
When work is complete, the forum will be available at a new domain: rubin.community
Links to content on community.lsst.org will continue to work for an extended transition period.
Click below if you’re interested in the gory details.
Gory details
We are currently self-hosting this forum, which is based on the Discourse platform. On the 24th we are changing to an infrastructure hosted by Discourse. This will allow us to pick up improvements much faster, and take advantage of a wider range of supported plugins for additional functionality.
The dedicated new domain for the forum (rubin.community) improves our ability to support the forum and add new capabilities (and is a better match for how we refer to our community since the name change to Rubin Observatory).
We’ll be putting mechanisms in place to make sure that folks with links/bookmarks to community.lsst.org will be re-directed to the new location until we’re sure everyone has gotten the message.
Your account, history and posts will all be migrated to the new forum. Nothing will be lost.
We expect migration and checkout to take most of the day, so plan around that. Content on community.lsst.org will be available throughout this time, but you will not be able to post new content on migration day to avoid losing any content in the migration.
Updates on the migration and announcement that the work is complete will also be posted in banners on the Rubin Science Platform at data.lsst.cloud
This sounds like a great plan. Thanks for working on it.
But re:
We’ll be putting mechanisms in place to make sure that folks with links/bookmarks to community.lsst.org 1 will be re-directed to the new location until we’re sure everyone has gotten the message.
I think that there is no point in time at which everyone will have effectively gotten the message. The site has existed for quite some time and is very public and lots of people have saved links In lots of ways to lots of very interesting and historic information already. See the classic post on this topic from 1998 by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee
The whole thing is a great read, but this section is worth quoting here:
Why should I care?
When you change a URI on your server, you can never completely tell who will have links to the old URI. They might have made links from regular web pages. They might have bookmarked your page. They might have scrawled the URI in the margin of a letter to a friend.
When someone follows a link and it breaks, they generally lose confidence in the owner of the server. They also are frustrated - emotionally and practically from accomplishing their goal.
Enough people complain all the time about dangling links that I hope the damage is obvious. I hope it also obvious that the reputation damage is to the maintainer of the server whose document vanished.
So please keep the old domain active for the indefinite future with redirect links to the content on the new site! I trust that the good folks running Discourse have ways to make that straightforward.
Hi actually not a Discourse feature, we in fact implemented the forward feature ourselves exactly for the reasons you state.
However, I also don’t want this convenience function to become a crutch for avoiding migrating indefinitely so no, I am not going to promise to keep it around until the heat death of the universe (URLs are not DoIs!). We do need to move the forum off lsst.org, we’re not doing it on a whim.
That said, we can tell when lsst.org links are being used to access the forum, so you do not need to be concerned that we will terminate the forward while people are still relying on it, don’t worry.
Thanks, I appreciate your attention to the need for forwarding!
Can you share more about your solution? Others should be interested in the same problem.
I understand the desire to get people to stop using the old community.lsst.org name. A whole-site redirect preserving paths would keep old links working very simply, but it would also mean that essentially any community.lsst.org/... URL — even one corresponding to a thread created much later — would continue to work as an alternate entry point to the new site.
So I can see a real tension there. It sounds like a tradeoff between eventually making the old hostname truly go away, versus preserving the long tail of historical references. For the proverbial URL on a napkin, a specific old link might be followed very rarely, but at essentially any time in the future.
Perhaps old and new threads could be distinguished fairly simply - for example, by the monotonically-increasing topic IDs that existed at migration time - so it really isn’t easy to casually misuse the old name.
I’m curious what solution you’ve arrived at, and what the continuing cost or operational burden is.