Forum migration needs to be more careful

Everything Else
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I just received an email saying the forum will be migrated to a new platform. Although I really think this is a good move and long overdue, I think Peplink might need to be more careful on how to implement this.

First, I don’t know if there was any beta testing on this. The fact is that a few years ago, Ubiquiti Networks had beta tested their new forum platform for a month, and after they didn’t get much bad comments about it, they went ahead to migrate to the new platform, and then they got a huge amount of complaints. This is partially because of many bugs in the new platform, partially because the lack of some existing features, and partially because people simply didn’t get used to it!

After struggling for a few weeks, they had to roll it back! It caused a lot of disruptions and offended many forum users.

Then 1-2 years later, they came up with another migration to a new platform, this time with more formal testing, still a lot of complaints, not because of bugs, but because of the lack of existing features and a change of habit.

I don’t think Peplink will end up with exact the same problems since active users here are not as many, and I don’t think Peplink should stay with the current forum platform without improving. But I do think this migration should be approached more carefully:

  1. Do some thorough testing to prevent bugs. Best if you can set up some beta testing platform to let power users to try it first. If you can allow users to switch between old platform and new platform, it would be the best, but I know it is often not possible technically.
  2. Add as many existing features as possible to the new platform before migrating.
  3. Have some contingent plan to roll it back to the old platform if needed.

Believe me, no matter how careful you are, there will always be some complaints, simply because people don’t like to change their habit. This is OK, don’t stop innovating/improving just because of that, but at the same time, users’ unhappiness is not always unwarranted and should be addresses as much as possible.

Finally, I am hopeful and eager to see the new forum!

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As long as the firmware remains a cut above the rest, I’m happy :smiley:

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This forum uses Discorse, as do all my other favorite forums at the moment.

I hope they don’t ruin the expiernece by going to something else, as there are a lot of really bad forum softwares out there…

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Hi Dajian888,

We’re happy to hear you’re eager to see the new forum!

Please rest assured that all points raised have had careful consideration prior to implementation and we aim to carry out this migration process as smoothly as we can.

Our platform will see all existing features with a few minor adjustments in the upcoming launch. This is like you said, to avoid major disruption to users’ habits/ experience. As we start to familiarise ourselves with the new platform we will gradually implement new exciting features and plans. The aim is to ease our users to this change slowly but surely rather than immerse our users in a completely new platform at once.

Thanks for your support, feel free to reach out to me if you have any features you would love to see implemented! :grin:

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Thanks for the explanation. Regrading to improvement suggestions, for the current forum, I don’t like the fact that a lot of the “buttons” are shown as “text titles”, such as “categories, new, unread, top” on the top of the page. For old users, this way looks nicer. For new users, I wonder if they can figure out these are actually “buttons” they can click on, because they really look like texts on the page.

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Was this email sent to all forum users? I never received such an email?

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Can someone please confirm whether all thread subscriptions and bookmarks will migrate over? I have years of information here that is very valuable.