I think most of the comments you are making are pretty meaningful and I must admit some of them we had probably not given enough importance to.
Let me elaborate this, I will do it as a list, since it will allow for further commenting by those of you interested. I think the discussion at this level is very healthy, and even if I might not be able of sleeping in the incoming weeks, I will do my best to make your concerns come to a good end.
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the icons: dude, if you like them, I will make sure they are there, but please first give a try to the new ones
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the current status and amount of messages posted: this is doable, we didn't have this into our list, but I can understand the importance of the status for you guys and I will talk to the team in order to try to make this happen, if not the day planned for the migration, then later. I must say our idea was to promote those of you really active to moderators, but that was of course a given
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transferring the previous posts to the new system (this is a longer issue, let me explain it)
Yabb is a file based system, it counts with 4 files per user: userinfo, user logs, user posts, and user messages. 37.000 users means 4 times more files ... IN A SINGLE FOLDER
The converters existing for moving from Yabb to SMF are NOT working, sorry for the SMF developers, but it took me a week to hack it and make it work again.
Right now we have stream-lined the process of migrating the users but not so much the posts. Mostly because we consider the new forum has to be structured in a completely different way. After 5 years with the current set of categories, we have gained quite some experience in the topics that matter the most to people and have identified the categories that seem to make the most sense.
The time it takes to migrate the 37.000 users to SMF is irrelevant, in my 2.3GHZ laptop I need about 3 hours. Then the database has to be filtered, because as explained, this is not just about the forum, this is about having a so-called Single Sign On system that will work all over the Arduino system: A single usernam and password to work on the forum, the wiki, the blog (the day we open it for external editors), other wikis, the store, and future services we have in our roadmap.
This means, our SMF is not really SMF, it is SMF made into our own identification system.
However, even if I think it is a perfectly valid point the one of having a single location where to search for information from the forum, we didn't conceive it like that in the first place. One possible solution, that cannot be scheduled for next Monday, but could be in a week more, is to make a category called "old" where to push in all the old messages into a single table, having the current categories as subcategories of that old forum. We could make it so that that table would not be editable but by moderators. Then users could request to move some of those topics to the new boards.
This is a lot of work, but if there are 15 volunteers, we could consider it. To me it will me I will sleep one week less this year, but it will be worth the effort.
Summarizing, I think the following things have to be considered:
- moving the current user status to the new system
- adding the current messages as a subcategory just to have them searchable
- checking the emoticons and maybe use the current ones (just to please you above all the other 36.999 users )
Something to think about:
- letting a bunch of moderators access to a read-only archive to -upon request- move topics of importance to the new boards
Any other thoughts?