Cristian and I (D. Cuartielles) have been working around the clock with the forum migration for the last week. Before we made a lot of  research and migration tests, and believe me when I say a lot I really mean A LOT.

However, no matter how many times you try things out, when the moment of truth comes, Murphy’s Law will make things much more complicated than you thought in the first place. After an 18 hours coding shift and a 3 hours sleep, I came back to my office to go on with the forum migration, and took a chance to read through the overwhelming response to our previous post on the topic. There are lots of comments expressing interest in the choices we have made when it comes to the software, the user status, etc. Let me throw some light on those issues:

• the forum of choice is SMF, the reason for this is that we wanted to have an open source piece of software we could accommodate to our needs, that we could easily change, database driven, etc
• the decision of not moving the messages has to do with the fact that there is a complete different way of arranging the contents in the new forum, the old forum will have them there, we have disabled registering to it, and we have disabled posting new topics, however it is still possible answering to open topics by the authors themselves in some threads
• we have anyway managed to migrate all the topics, user status, amounts of messages, personal messages, etc. We will not roll out all the changes in the new forum, because we found some problems due to the format information was stored in the old forum and the way it is stored in the new one (for those interested it is an ISO vs UTF matter)
• it is taking over 24 hours to port the forum, the reason for this is that we discovered during our last minute tests that the conversion scripts we had designed were not acting as expected mostly because of the above mentioned difference in encoding formats. We will open today, but we might not bring all the data in at once, just to make sure things act as they should
• the playground will not be migrated, nor erased, this is a misunderstanding. Everything in the playground will be kept in there and all the users that are registered in the system will have access to edit the contents freely, just like until now. The difference is that you will have one single username and one single password to access both the forum and the playground. It is our aim to improve the service given by that wiki by adding modules that will allow better search, embedding content, etc

Arduino Forum 2011 - Preview

I saw Cristian showing up online from Italy it is time to continue the work until we are done. Thanks for your patience, the forum will open asap.