Hello everyone! I am Wendell and you may know me from Level1Techs. Preserving this community was important to me so I undertook to do what I could to preserve it. We at Level1Techs have been hard at work on a migration to the Discourse forum software, which has taken some time. Sometimes life gets in the way, so it has taken longer than I expected. It is custom forum software we're on now, and I wanted the conversion to be high fidelity. It was also necessary to bend Discourse to our will a bit to preserve some things the way they are here.

I am very happy with the quality of the conversion data at this point and we are nearly ready to cut over to the new software.

The Hugest of Thanks to @plutomaniac and @Fernando for helping facilitate the preservation. Some aspects of conversion have been tedious! But we're on the other side of that now.

When we get the go-ahead from the current host the forum will be put into Read Only mode. It could be any day now.

I do not have your passwords, so you will have to use the "forgot password" facility to reset your password. * Use this time to make sure your forum email address is up to date! *

We are doing the work at a new domain, but keeping the Win-Raid name. The win-raid.com domain will redirect to the new site when the conversion is complete and when everything has fully rolled over the win-raid.com domain will continue to work. Special care has been taken to make sure all the old post URLs work, too.

It will take us up to about 8 hours to let the script run once we get the most up-to-date dump of the database powering the forum. After that, it should be smooth sailing.

We are moving to the forum software called Discourse. We are planning some custom plugins for functionality we need, and we plan to update the UI/UX of the forum software after the conversion is complete. In other words, we would like to keep working on and improving the site design and UI/UX for the users after conversion. This is not merely a preservation mission!

Some of you may say "Why not Discord?" Discord is ephemeral. It is not easy to preserve knowledge in Discord. Here.. knowledge is for the ages! It's already here. We are entering an era of computation where user-control of firmware and blobs on their devices is more critical than ever. This is one of the best resources on the net for that kind of thing, and more. The community here is nothing short of amazing and my goal is to make it easy for the community here to do the important work they are doing with the least amount of headache and friction possible.

I am sure that once we cut over there will be many ideas for further improvements and customizations and that sort of thing. Great! If you're in it to make the community more awesome, welcome, let's get it done. :)

Thank you

Check back this thread -- I will update this post and add links when the forum has gone read only and the transfer is in progress. It should not take long!

thank you! and glad to be here!

Wendell