###Update 2: Peercointalk.org Placed Into Read-Only Mode
Peercointalk.org has now been placed into read-only mode, giving members some more time to copy down any private messages that may be important to them. At some point in the future the forum will be taken offline and the domain name will be redirected to this forum.
###Update: Registrations Now Open
After a week long period of testing, we’ve determined that the forum is operating normally, so we’ve just opened registrations. This forum is now fully operational! We will now work with FuzzyBear to take the necessary steps to have the peercointalk.org domain redirected to this forum.
While we don’t have a closing date yet for peercointalk.org, we suggest that you begin preparing for its closure. In the process of migrating all content to the new forum, we intentionally left out private messages, so if there is any important information you have stored in PMs on the old forum, please take this opportunity now to copy it down. As soon as we have an official date for redirection of the domain from FuzzyBear, we will update this thread again.
#Welcome to the New Peercointalk!
Welcome to the new Peercointalk! This brand new forum has been in the works for almost 2 years now. It began here with me arguing my case for switching to a lighter, cleaner and more mobile friendly forum that was integrated into our main website at peercoin.net. It was determined that this would be a massive undertaking and that it should only be done if we could figure out how to migrate all our existing forum content over. So we just ended up making our forum theme nicer looking and we put it on hold.
About 9 months later, @jooize came out in support of my plan and released his vision for peercoin.net and the forum, detailing all the benefits of switching to discourse. It would provide what we believed to be a superior user experience and public image for Peercoin and its community. While Jooize received a positive response for his plan, things did not really get started until around the middle of 2016, when we started going through our rebranding phase for Peercoin.
I reached out to Jooize on July 22nd, 2016 and told him of my intention to move forward with migrating the Peercointalk forum to discourse and I asked him for his help. He was more than happy to help the community with this task and for the past 5 months we’ve worked together to bring it to you. Jooize handled the technical side while I handled the organizing.
There were quite a few delays during the process as well. Jooize still helps out at Nu with liquidity operations, so he was only able to help out in his spare time. We also had a lot of issues with the SMF to discourse migration script that needed to be fixed. We were actually almost ready to release the forum a month ago, but we realized at the last minute that the posts in the migrated threads were out of order and had to cancel the launch and figure out what in the migration script was causing it to happen. Luckily @sigmike came to our rescue. He has been very valuable in helping us fix technical issues like this.
So now that everything is finished, we’re ready to open the new forum for a beta release to existing members of peercointalk.org. If everything seems ok with the forum, then we’ll open it up for new registrations and announce it to the wider community. For now we are testing to make sure everything works like intended. @peerchemist has offered to operate the forum server in addition to peercoin.chat and I will administrate the forum, similar to what I’ve been doing for Peercointalk the past several years. We urged @FuzzyBear to join us and even offered him the chance to operate the new forum, but he declined. Fuzzy has become very familiar with SMF and did not have the time or resources to dedicate toward learning a new platform like discourse. He told us that he’d like to focus more on coding, rather than administration.
I would like to personally thank Fuzzy for putting up with me bugging him about this for the last 2 years as well as allowing us the opportunity to improve our public image. This would not have been possible if he did not give us a copy of the database to do the migration. I’d also like to thank @jooize for all his help, @sigmike for the fixes on the script, @peerchemist for setting up the server, @MAL and @super3 for helping out with changing the DNS settings. None of this could have been achieved without their help.
Once everything is up and running without any problems, FuzzyBear will most likely close down the old forum and redirect the https://www.peercointalk.org/ domain to https://talk.peercoin.net/. For now though we will be in beta. If you are an existing member of peercointalk.org, please follow these instructions to reactivate your account…
#Reactivating Your Account & Logging In
All user names and passwords have been migrated over from the SMF forum, so please login with the same username and password you usually use. If you enter in the correct credentials, you will see a message pop up asking you to reactivate your account. Click the link and the forum will send out a reactivation email to the email address that is tied to your user account. Find the email and follow the instructions to reactivate your Peercointalk account. Peerchemist had an issue receiving his reactivation email at first, but it turned out it was just delayed some, so if you don’t receive it immediately it’s possible it might just take a little bit to show up in your inbox. If for some reason your password wasn’t converted properly and doesn’t work, try resetting it.
Certain user names with special characters in it were not compatible with the discourse format and were automatically converted to something else. If you can’t login because of this, search for your previous SMF user name with the magnifying glass located in the top right navigation bar. Your migrated user name should appear in search. Use this new user name along with your existing password to login. Once you reactivate your account and login, post in this thread if you want us to change your user name. As an example, the user account D. Winters contained a period, so the user name was automatically converted to 1112, which shows up when you search D. Winters. You would then use 1112 in the user name field and use your existing password.
#Reporting Technical Issues
If you experience any technical issues logging in, please report them over at peercoin.chat or in the announcement thread at peercointalk.org. If you are already logged in, but experience any issues with the forum, please post them in this thread so we can look into it.
Thanks for your patience in this transition phase. We have big things planned for Peercoin in 2017 and we hope this new forum software will encourage more participation and discussion and that it is a pleasant experience for the whole community. Thanks everyone! And as Sunny King would say, have fun!
