Thread: Site move

Thanks for all that.

Originally Posted by sharptonn

Lord knows there is a huge pile of B.S. that can be omitted. Lots of irrelevant threads, pictures, non contributing, long absent members, spam, etc.

Get rid of anything that I have posted or commented on!

I have a few suggestions on what I would do if I was moving this site. I don't have ant IT experience so not sure how easy or hard it would be.

1. Prioritize any important sticky threads or old competitions/meet up threads.

2. Save as much of the photos from the popular threads - maybe the new site can have different galleries for different threads. Top picks would be show your stones for the major naturals, razor clubs, any old labels and advertising.

3. Would probably delete/not worry about any threads with less than some number of replies (I'm thinking 50 or so). Would hopefully cut out a lot of random simple question threads that can be answered in a how to post.

4. I probably would probably cut out a lot of discussion post, what did you shave/hone today type threads, member introduction. If the new site is great, there will be plenty of these.

Overall my main focus would be saving important photos of stones/razors for reference. I think a lot of the "how to" stuff could be summarized/reorganized without saving every "how do I" post. After that I would just focus on making a good website that will hopefully be filled with new people/information.

As stated above by Bruno, most of the content of the forums will just "magically" move to the new platform.
What you are proposing is not even in the scope of what I would call a "migration", which is the term for "I wan't the exact same content in another system".
Migration are purely technical, it's just a matter of saying "we call that a box and they call that a container, let's have a tool which copies the contents of boxes to containers".

The issues stem from the fact that SRP is more a community and less a forum. Yes, you have a forum, and that's easy to migrate, but the community has added flowers and a goat next to the boxes.
And on the other side, they only have "containers".

Can your goat be assimilated as a container ?
For the flowers, do we use one container per flower, or one container by species ?

These are more, I suppose, the kind of questions the admins have to answer

I realize it's rather unclear to people who don't have the technical background, which is most people, and I've probably made it sound worrisome.

The site consists of several relatively independent pieces:
* The forums
* The articles/pages system on the home page, the base sharprazorpalace.com adress
* The library at shavelibrary.com

They are each separate software. The articles is most closely integrated but it is still a separate software glued to the forum so that it can share the userbase and some permissions. The library is completely independent software.

On the day-to-day basis the most used thing, of course is the forum, so that's what we start with.
It's moved as a whole - converted to a new software, but everything that is in the current forum would be in the new system with the same organization and functionality. This is an automatic process, we run a convertor and it transforms the old format to the new. Of course the convertor isn't perfect and sometimes it can not handle customizations we've made, or features we've added. And there are fundamental things that must be done properly, so even if the convertor will do them it's necessary a human go over and verify - one example of that is the permissions system.
Then there are more superficial things that do not affect the functionality, but can cause (sometimes great) inconvenience. For example the software terminology can change sometimes because the functionality is just a bit different.
As I mentioned the new software has a system for private communication between members alike the private messages system on the current software. But it's not 1:1 correspondence. In the new system these communications are organized like forum threads (but available only to the participants), so it is more natural to be called 'conversations' instead of 'messages' and that's how they've named them. So you see a button 'Start a Conversation' instead 'Send a Private Message'.
The developers could've chosen to call them 'private threads' or 'private discussions' because from what I can tell they're analogous to the regular public threads/discussions, but I'm sure they've put a log more thought into this than I'm at the moment. The good thing is that the software (the current and the new) do have a system to tweak these things and we can replace the original terminology the software comes with with our own.
Another example would be the overall look - in principle it is possible to make the forum under the new software look 90% like the current one - colors, buttons, fonts, sizes, etc. But that's a lot of work and unless there is someone volunteering to do it, or to hire someone to do it, we simply do not have the resources to put into it. Last time around Eric (HNSB) put a lot of effort into modifying the look that the software comes with to the current one, which was a close match to the previous iteration (somewhat modernized primarily on which rectangles on the page have sharp corners and which are slightly rounded, the level of contrast between different elements...) I've looked a bit for a theme (look) that's similar to the current one - there are people who specialize in developing these things and sell them - but haven't yet found anything I like enough. That is fairly important for the usability - if it's tiring on the eyes to use the forum, or hard to click on a button (maybe because it's too close to another one) - we will be using it less or not at all.

Then there is other type of work, related to the move, which is more about the functionality of the underlying infrastructure, or the interaction with the non-forum. Example of this would be making sure that the connections are properly encrypted, that the email service is done well so the various notification emails that the forum software sends don't get sorted as spam by the recipient's servers, that the filter between the forum and the internet works as it should. Also it's rather important to ensure that links to posts in the format of the old site redirect to the new locations. If that's not done right, there will be a big penalty from Google and other search engines as it will treat the forum as something unknown with no ranking whatsoever and it'll take around a year or two before we regain the current ranking. OTOH, google likes the new software much better than the old, mostly because it's faster, and that would increase our ranking. Speed is secondary to content, though, so google old links working correctly is more important.

The library would also be moved in an analogous manner, but that's harder move, mostly because of our 'straight razor database' feature. It's essentially a software we wrote and getting it to work with the updated library software is not going to be super easy. I don't remember off the top of my head who was the main developer of it, but they haven't been around for a while. In the last update of the library software I did the updates to the razor database code, so I've done it once, and presumably can do it again, but it's not very easy for me and takes a lot of time.

The front page articles system is somewhere in the middle of these. We will have to use a new system for that, which can at the very least talk to the forum part, however there is most likely no importer to convert from our system to the new one. There are two possibilities. The better one is writing a converter. It means understanding the workings of the new and the old systems and since the functionality is analogous there is a map between the pieces of the old one to the pieces of the new. Then one writes a program which takes the stuff from the old software and puts it to the correct place in the new software. Even if it's not perfect, it may be beneficial to do some of the transfer this way. The only problem is that it needs the expertise to write such a convertor, or the money to hire a person who'd do it.
A second way of doing it is manually - a person or a group of people goes to the old system and copies things one by one to the new one. That's quite tedious but it is a way - any person who has the technical level of creating forum posts with images should be able to learn how to use the new system and recreate within it the articles from the old system.

One way or another we are not simply throwing away these things - Obie's interviews, the historical information articles, etc.

Anyways, it's a rather long post, but hopefully it clarifies the process.

Edit: While I was writing my long post below, Aggelos's metaphor probably explained it better

Originally Posted by Aggelos

These are more, I suppose, the kind of questions the admins have to answer

To me the overriding thing is the community - all things we do, or don't, should help not hinder it. So even if I like my flowers grow organically, i.e. basically be weeds, if we as a community would want a Versailles garden, then the later is what we try to do to the best we can

The thing is that, as much as I may like to test things extensively before switching, I know that it simply won't happen. We've been through this many times over the years, so in the end trying to do more testing just wastes time and delays things without providing any benefit.
That's why I think we'll switch when those who actually go through the trouble to kick the tires say we're fine. And then everyone would start finding out the good, the bad, and the ugly and that's when we all, as a community, will have to come up with how things will end up being.

It's all good. Pull the trigger and let's get rolling!

If posts by Neil Miller could be preserved, I for one (and likely the only one! ) would be eternally grateful.

Originally Posted by sharptonn

If posts by Neil Miller could be preserved, I for one (and likely the only one! ) would be eternally grateful.

I agree.
Neil made exceptional contributions here that cannot be duplicated.

I am happy we can still have all the words from so many historians and experts. Martin, Zak and so many others. Some were short-termers and others a flash in the pan. Real info.
IMO, very interesting as the history of shaving has followed men for a good long while!

The things dug up around here over the years are fascinating. It's all here.

On to the future!