Old forum URLs - what happens after full migration to new platform?

If you need anything that's still on the old forum I'd say it would be best to copy it now.

I think it's very likely that content that got posted in the connect iq forums after that "the message" of the move appeared will not be transferred.

As you already pointed out the topic ids don't match with the old topic ids, so I think it's very unlikely that there will be redirects implemented for all old forum topics to their new placeholder...

It would be good that at least the how to do app settings topic would have a .htaccess redirect from the old topic url to the new one though as a lot of people do link to that one....

The transition that Coleman is talking about has really already been done for CIQ - we were kind of the test case - and what's happening next is the transmission of all the other forums - platform, devices, etc.

About they only thing we should see is the old CIQ forums will be gone/unavailable - but everything there up to a certain date has already been moved to the new forums, so no need of a read-only archive.

Some things might not have come across clean, like links, but that's now in the past.  I doubt any posts made in the old CIQ forum after the cutover will make it to the new one, but time will tell - they might.

But yes, we're going to have to update some links in things like the app store that point to a showcase thread.

peterdedecker said:

It would be good that at least the how to do app settings topic would have a .htaccess redirect from the old topic url to the new one though as a lot of people do link to that one....

I'm thinking it might be time to just turn Teun's"how to" for app settings into something like a wiki here, and at the same time add info on the new Connect IQ Store app without a redirect.

Yes, the url will have to change for a number of things in the app store, but it strikes me as a cleaner approach.  Links to things like showcase threads will already require changes in the app store.

jim_m_58 said:

The transition that Coleman is talking about has really already been done for CIQ - we were kind of the test case - and what's happening next is the transmission of all the other forums - platform, devices, etc.

Thanks, I realize that. That's why I posted the question.

jim_m_58 said:

About they only thing we should see is the old CIQ forums will be gone/unavailable - but everything there up to a certain date has already been moved to the new forums, so no need of a read-only archive.

Some things might not have come across clean, like links, but that's now in the past.  I doubt any posts made in the old CIQ forum after the cutover will make it to the new one, but time will tell - they might.

But yes, we're going to have to update some links in things like the app store that point to a showcase thread.

Yes, I realize we have to update our own links, which I have already done.

My concern, as outlined in my original post, is:

• Links from Google results (yes, these should die eventually)
• Links on websites/social media that are out of our control
• Links in store descriptions of old apps which are no longer maintained. e.g. A link to app settings FAQ, like Peter pointed out

I am also concerned about content in the old forum...

• ...which may also be linked from outside websites
• ...which may be linked from within the forum itself. i.e. One topic referencing another topic -- there are many times when a question has been asked more than once, and someone just says "Here's a link to the relevant topic"

Some of the older content is still relevant (like posts on how to backup and restore watch settings when you want to do a factory reset).

My only point was the content on the old forum and new forum platforms is not identical (different URLs, some content not transferred properly), which is why maybe it would've been nice to have a read-only archive. But I'm pretty sure there won't be, which is fine.

I hate to be Captain Obvious, but one of the early design goals of the web was that URLs are supposed to last forever. I realize that these days with ephemeral content and infinite scroll (nobody case about anything older than 2 days), a lot of people don't care about preserving URLs or content. But in this case, content is being preserved (mostly) but all the URLs are being changed....

Lemme TL;DR it and frame it slightly differently:

• Do the old forums have useful information?
• Is it possible that outside websites/social media have linked to that information? What about links from one forum topic to another? i.e. "Oh, the question you asked has been answered before. Here's a link to that topic."
• Do we care if those links break?

jim_m_58 said:

I'm thinking it might be time to just turn Teun's"how to" for app settings into something like a wiki here, and at the same time add info on the new Connect IQ Store app without a redirect.

Great idea. We are hoping to leverage features like this in the community platform so that common things are more visible.

To address your questions:

• The old forums had lots of useful info, but when we did our migration over to the new platform we brought everything over. You are correct in saying that there are some issues (a few links, formatting, images, etc). However, we haven't lost the content of the posts.
• The best solution we have for this is top level redirects. With the amount of posts in the old and new forums, it wasn't feasible to create a direct mapping between old and new threads and get the proper redirects created for each individual piece of content. These redirects will drop users who attempt to access content from an old URL to the top level of the new platform. It's not ideal, but it's better than 404 errors all over the internet.
• We do care, but we have to make some compromises to find a viable solution.

I hope that's helpful. We definitely care about all of our content and giving folks a great experience, but there are issues that come up with major changes like this. In summary, the old forums will not be read only, they will go away completely, though all of their content will be help in this new community.

Thank you,

-Coleman

Thanks, Coleman, that's pretty much what I figured.

I get that it's all a compromise, so it is what it is. I also realize that it will be less of an issue as time passes, until finally nobody even remembers the old forums. There are many companies which just nuked their forums in favour of FB (cough cough Runners World), so I'm glad we still have a decent forum platform to use. And it's great that all the old content will still be around.

Thanks for the reply!