Migrate to a Different Forum Software

[eXpl0it3r]

SFML has been using SMF (Simple Machines Forum) for many years. While it's been a good enough experience, there are three problems that would encourage us to move away from SMF:

• The software foundation is decades old and there isn't a goal insight to completely modernize to a "safer" architecture
• The plugin system is beyond horrible, patching the actual core files with diff-patches, which is especially "fun" if you have multiple plugins patch the same file
• The theme is not mobile friendly, even with some adjustments it will probably always have certain limitations, as mobile usage was non-existent when SMF was originally created

Software Selection

Some of the Requirements:

• Easily self-hostable
• Non-commercial, or no recurring cost
• Preferable "boring tech", best matching our current stack (PHP, MariaDB, Nginx)
• No massive scaling required (max concurrent users ~300)
• Mobile-friendly
• Modern architecture
• Basic moderation tooling

Migration Path

• Evaluate Flarum
  • SMF2 to Flarum migration script
  • Ensure users are correctly migrated and can login
  • Check if there's a possibility to request a password change and/or the hash is updated automatically
  • Check performance
    • Tag load times
    • Discussion load times
    • Search performance
  • Extensions
    • Traditional forum style: https://github.com/askvortsov1/flarum-categories
• Announce migration on the forum (EN & FR)
• Consider cleaning up spam user accounts (somehow)
• Clean up duplicated usernames

  •   SELECT member_name, COUNT(*) FROM smf_members
      GROUP BY member_name
      HAVING COUNT(*) > 1

• Archive the French forums (as discussed)
• Remove the SubForums plugin, essentially merging the English and French forums
• Ensure forum names are unique to prevent tag collisions
• Move the forum to https://www.sfml-dev.org/forums/ without the en.* or fr.* subdomain
  • Implement a redirections for en.* and fr.*
• Implement a redirection script for SMF links to Flarum links
  • Can this be generic or does it need DB look ups?
  • Consider fixing Old forum links without sub-domain fail in a 404 #148
• Put the forum in maintenance mode
• Do the data migration
• Switch to the new forum