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mvader (Victron Energy) avatar image
mvader (Victron Energy) asked

Announcing the new Community - starting with Modifications

Hello Victron Community, modifications section!


The Victron Community has outgrown its current infrastructure, and we are excited to announce that we are starting the move to a new home.

This transition will be done in stages, and the modifications community will be the first to experience the public beta version and provide feedback before the full site launch.

You will need to create a new account. Our apologies to those who have built up a solid reputation score and post history, we are confident that in the long run this disruption will be worth it.

You can access the new site here right now - https://victron.discourse.group/. Once all is stable and proven, we will point the https://community.victronenergy.com url to that discourse site as well and complete the transition.


What to expect

  • New features: Improved notifications, last read awareness, and more.

  • More speed! - The new site loads up to 10X faster. It’s also a better mobile experience (50% of visitors).

  • Compulsory tags: We are introducing tag groups for 'products', 'market', and 'experience level'. Each new topic will require a tag from each group. This should help finding the type of content that is most relevant to you.

  • Visual changes: Expect visual layout changes as we work on the new community theme. Please use the "Site Feedback" section to share your suggestions.

  • Better layout - Based on your feedback and usage we have improved the layout to help you find what you need faster, especially on longer topics.

  • Better tags - We are taking the most used tags based on the last 5 years to make finding the exact content easier.


What it means for you

Old content is, at least for now, not migrated

We have decided not to import old content to the new platform. This may come as a shock, but in the long run it is for the best. The old content will remain accessible as read only for now. We also have a transition plan so that old links do not break.

We expect that new content will quickly replace the old, and we will be monitoring traffic to make sure that the best content is available on the new site.

Starting with the modifications space the existing AnswerHub site will be locked to new posts and changes. Users will be directed to the new Discourse -hosted community site.

A permanent offline backup of the old site content has been made, and the future of this content will be decided later. Please share your thoughts in the new Site Feedback section.


Technical Background

Launched in 2019, the Victron community site has grown to around 160,000 users per month. Despite our efforts, page load speeds and spam attacks have degraded the user experience. After much consideration, we decided that a new platform is the best option.

The new platform, based on open-source software called Discourse, aligns with Victron's open-source ethos. It is used by many other large communities and should support our growth for the next decade and beyond.

We look forward to your feedback and a smooth transition to our new community home.


Conclusion

While testing the new platform in a small group, we've thoroughly enjoyed the new platform. Most of all the load speed and better editor.

We hope you enjoy it as well and look for to seeing you on the new Modifications category as well as the new Beta testing category.

For any feedback on the new platform, we're welcome to hear your opinion, there is a the New Community Feedback Category. (and knowing that you're happy with it is also good to know!)

Thank you for your continued support of Victron!


Guy Stewart - Community Manager
Matthijs Vader - CEO

new community site - hosted on discourse
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jjbond avatar image jjbond commented ·

Wow, continuing the reason I love Victron, non stop development and growth as well as customer commitment to improving… well done Guy and team. I am hopeful you never take down the wealth of information on the legacy site it’s been so valuable to me. In fact, if there’s a way to purchase a copy of it I’d buy an archive and bet others would as well, or please keep it as a searchable resource, there is so much knowledge there that’s useful to everyone.

Cheers

Jen

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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ jjbond commented ·

Hi @jjbond

I love the feedback and the enthusiasm :)

We have a full offline backup of all the site content (including database and attachments) for a permanent static archive.

I haven't committed to anything yet with what we are going to do with it, but I expect a very basic searchable database of some sort will remain available.

I think selling it might be problematic, but it does help make the case that it's worth keeping longer term.

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7 Answers
Kevin Windrem avatar image
Kevin Windrem answered ·

Transitions are always tough but I feel it essential that you bring at least some of the old community forum into the new platform there is such a wealth of information there and having it in a separate space without the ability to continue threads of conversation is going to seriously hinder the community interaction.

Can some mechanism permit a contributor to transfer a thread to the new forum? This could be automagic or through a request to the forum moderators.

I also hope the new forum has improvements in the following area:

Search - The current search mechanism really doesn't provide useful results and can either miss important posts or provide way too many off topic results.

The current list of posts a user has made is cumbersome to search. Not enough posts are shown at one time and calling up the next batch of posts takes way too long. Searching within this list would certainly help. More results at a time would also be very useful.

Adding a list of watched threads and showing when new posts have been made would be very useful.

You already may have mentioned this but I find it difficult to find new posts to large threads like the one used for beta tests.

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nickdb avatar image nickdb ♦♦ commented ·

It is easy to copy and paste an existing post to discourse. The subsequent comments are more challenging.

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dmsims avatar image dmsims nickdb ♦♦ commented ·

The comments are normally more valuable, just take the information on Shelly devices as an example

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dmsims avatar image
dmsims answered ·

One of the great resources is being able to search the existing content, that will be lost

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nickdb avatar image nickdb ♦♦ commented ·

The old site will remain for a while as a reference and there is a full copy of the data. There may well still be some topics imported.

One of the challenges is the enormous amount of “noise” - dated topics, unanswered, poorly defined or duplicate - which actually makes it very difficult to find good answers because the site has become quite cluttered over time.

It isn’t an easy choice to decide if short term pain has longer term benefits.

These decisions aren’t taken lightly and without a lot of consideration, also why we are doing a soft-open and asking for feedback, so all comments are very welcome.

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jjbond avatar image jjbond nickdb ♦♦ commented ·

If you can sell a copy of the legacy articles on a thumb drive etc I’d buy a copy, some great info I sure hope we don’t lose. Thanks for continuing to be so incredibly inclusive of your customers.

Cheers

Jen

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Anders avatar image Anders commented ·

Moving all these old threads is probably impossible - If it would be possible to make the content searchable from the new community that would be great. The threads could potentially be stored in simple "pdf documents". This would open up for a full shut down of the old community

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Juha Tuomala avatar image Juha Tuomala Anders commented ·

It's not impossible, I've done such db2db transitions. Only limiting factor would be if the new db layout supports the same relations and data as the old one. I such too doesn't exist yet, it could be written. Maybe something would be lost, but the majority, text content, author and some metadata would be transferrable for sure.

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nickdb avatar image
nickdb answered ·

Bumping...

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Juha Tuomala avatar image
Juha Tuomala answered ·

How about cleaning up the topics, I think there is a lot of entries that are wrong or don't serve their purpose anymore. Like the hydro and wind was the same even they're not.

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Anders avatar image
Anders answered ·

While Signing up I get a strange message on Password.

First I see "Your password looks good"screenshot-2024-07-31-075156.pngThen when pressing Sign Up I get. "That password is too common"
screenshot-2024-07-31-075150.pngEditing the password give again "Your password looks good"
Please advice


screenshot-2024-07-31-075156.png (3.6 KiB)
screenshot-2024-07-31-075150.png (4.6 KiB)
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nickdb avatar image nickdb ♦♦ commented ·

@Anders we have not see that so far on signups.

The password requirements are:

min length - 10 characters

unique characters - 6

It will then also prevent use of the 10000 most common passwords in a global database.

Try use a completely randomised, generated password. First close your session completely and remove any cookies for the site.

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Anders avatar image Anders nickdb ♦♦ commented ·

Solved - thank you

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Kevin Windrem avatar image
Kevin Windrem answered ·

Is is time to lock the Mods section of the old forum? I see recent posts here.

One thought about migration: would it be possible to provide an option to migrate a thread from the old forum to the new one when someone attempts to post to the old forum?

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nickdb avatar image nickdb ♦♦ commented ·

Hi Kevin, this is also my view. It just needs to be planned and announced. The soft-open has gone well so far. We've been able to address the various requests and adjust the default settings to support the community's requirements, so from a functional perspective we are ready.

At present the easiest option to "migrate" is to simply cut and paste the original post, I have done this myself. It is much more complicated to add all the various comments in a structured way, as Answerhub just has different post methodology to discourse.

I am sure Guy can provide some additional insight, but we are all working hard to make the transition as smooth as possible and to make the new community world class, so please bear with us.

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Kevin Windrem avatar image Kevin Windrem nickdb ♦♦ commented ·

If by "cut and paste" do you mean select the text of the original post and paste it into a new thread on the new forum?

That seems reasonable. Might be a good idea to recommend including a web link in that new post to the old thread. That way it's relatively easy to access the old comments.

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nickdb avatar image nickdb ♦♦ Kevin Windrem commented ·

Pretty much yes. I have tested this to work well, and easily.

Though attachments reference back to answerhub. On my tests I chose to download the attachments and reattach them so they were local to discourse, simply because it then loads waaay faster.

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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·

Hi @Kevin Windrem

Modifications was locked for new posts from most members today.

It is still possible to reply to old posts for now, but that will also get disabled soon and people should begin to move over (even for existing topics)

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Juha Tuomala avatar image
Juha Tuomala answered ·

Not sure how the passwords are stored in the old system, but being able to copy user accounts and authentication to new system would lower the adoption a lot. Imagine someone who visits rarely at community.victronenergy.com and his/her browser has the password stored. After the new system is moved to old url, browser will try to use those credentials and fail. That will cause confusion for 99% as they don't understand why their whole user account has been removed. Sure, some note could be written into log-in dialog, but it would be far better to transfer those credentials to new system.

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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·

Hi @Juha Tuomala,

A very valid consideration.

I will send an email to the members of this old site explaining the situation as part of the transition.

It's not viable to transition the user accounts and credentials. However there is another project underway on this front, as Victron currently has many potential independent user accounts (VRM, Victron Professional, Victron Community) and it can get pretty confusing.

Moving to the new site will eventually help with that, but not for a while.

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Juha Tuomala avatar image Juha Tuomala Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·

If the different stored credentials is the issue, you could transfer the rest and ask people to set a new password. Just a thought.

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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ Juha Tuomala commented ·

I think at least 50% of the community accounts are spam.

So I don’t want to bring them over.

The new community site on discourse will enforce email verification on registration (and more) to help us deal with the spam issue that has become overwhelming here.

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mr-manuel avatar image mr-manuel Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·
Maybe it would be useful, if usernames are reserved for the e-Mail address registered in the old community for some time, maybe 6 months after going live. This will prevent taking someone other over your old username and maybe reputation.
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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ mr-manuel commented ·
I am happy to set that policy that if a user has an email address and account name on this Victron Community site, that I will give them some rights to claim it on the new site.


This will be valid from when the transition happens, and account changes on this site are locked.

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mr-manuel avatar image mr-manuel Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·
What, if in the meanwhile someone other claims the username? I don‘t think that in this case users will contact Victron. You could check after the transition the e-Mail address of the users and send them a e-Mail, if they want to claim their username back. The new user then gets a random number attached to his username or something like that.
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Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) avatar image Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ mr-manuel commented ·

I will deal with it on a case by case basis, if they don't mind enough to contact me then that will be the end of it.

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nickdb avatar image nickdb ♦♦ mr-manuel commented ·

@mr-manuel Something else to consider, discourse has two user identifiers - the account (which you can @) and the name you want to be seen as, these are configured independently (but can be the same).

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Juha Tuomala avatar image Juha Tuomala Guy Stewart (Victron Community Manager) ♦♦ commented ·
Once you have that policy open, go ahead and openly write rest of it too, like how certain user removes user messages with opinions (based on what?), locks threads even there is sane discussion going on etc.


For me and I'm sure to others as well it feels more like East-German Stasi behaviour than open community, which doesn't encourage to donate time to forum. That is, it's damaging your business. We are paying customers bring value for your customer base.

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Michelle Konzack avatar image Michelle Konzack mr-manuel commented ·
I agree with it
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