The Gentoo Big Forum Upgrade

[John R. Graham]

The Gentoo Forums Project Team is pleased to announce that we are in the final stages of upgrading the Gentoo Forums to a modern version of phpBB: something in the 3.2.x series. The new forums software brings several benefits:

• Security enhancements.
  
• Better spam handling.
  
• Ability to run on a version of PHP that's not about to lose support. (Infra is especially happy about this one.)
  
• Select new features, through phpBB's plugin system, which we will roll out in a measured fashion over the next few months.

We're also working so that the look & feel of the new forums is not too jarringly different from what you're used to. Also, simultaneous with the upgrade, the Forums will be moving to new redundant hardware and a fault-tolerant database back-end.

The timeline of the upgrade will look like this:

1. The exact date & time of the start of the upgrade will be announced at least one week in advance. (We haven't set this date & time yet but we're close.)
   
2. On the announced date, the Forums will be made read only but will still be accessible as a fixed reference.
   
3. The existing Forums database will be backed up and restored onto the new back-end. We'll then start a database conversion and re-indexing task. All told, we're predicting that these tasks will run about a day.
   
4. Finally, DNS will be changed so that forums.gentoo.org points to the new servers and the new Forums will be live!

Watch for replies to this post for the announcement of the actual upgrade date and other updates on the status. Forum Admins will retain the ability to post status updates during the "read only" period; we'll keep you all posted.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them on this thread in Gentoo Chat.
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