EE Forums Changes

Last week EllisLab Director of Community Services Lisa Wess posted to the official blog about some changes coming to the EE forums. There are two parts to these changes:

The ExpressionEngine Support Forum Board, as you see it now, will be placed into an archive, read-only mode at a new URL. The forum board will still be searchable and accessible, but no new content will be added.

A new forum board will be present at the current location, expressionengine.com/forums. This new forum board places the emphasis on our Community and ExpressionEngine 2 while providing the legacy support EE 1.x deserves.

This seems like a simple way to keeping all of the resources so many depend on while also focusing on EE 2. With 99% of the information in the current forums being about EE 1, it could be difficult to find EE 2 information and problematic for newcomers.

The first step in this was last week when the forums went through a pruning. This is a clean up of old threads to keep the information in the forums current and relevant. Unfortunately, the pruning also deleted threads that were still being referenced, especially add-on threads. EllisLab reacted quickly and restored the Third Party Development area of the forums so add-ons that do not exist anywhere but in the forums are still available.

In general, I think it’s a bad idea to kill links on the internet. But as Leslie Camacho pointed out, almost all of the forum threads that were deleted were no longer being used (resolved support threads, etc.). This also isn’t the first time they’ve pruned the forums; it’s just the first time it hit some threads people still use.

Because of that, it’s great to hear that the old forums will be archived and searchable while the new forums will be a clean slate to post information and questions about EE 2. To make sure existing links to forum threads don’t break (like those on this site but more so those on devot:ee), EllisLab will be taking steps to do redirects and notifications:

We have worked with our Community Partners to ensure that important resources on their sites are preserved. We are also implementing 301 Redirects to ensure that links and bookmarks for EE 1.x support continue to function as expected.

In order to ease this transition, links will appear at the top of each forum; and a search on the primary Support Forums can easily be sent, via a link we will present on the Search Results page, to the archive.

No word yet on when the change will take place, but be prepared.

What do you think about this move away from the current forums and into a clean environment for final release of EE 2?