Planned changes to the OSRF Discourse(s)

General
2

Thank you to all who gave feedback on this plan. We’re in June now and we intend to move forward with these changes.

Here’s what you will see happen over the next few weeks:

  1. A lot of new categories are going to appear at the (current) ROS Discourse. These categories will be what have been described above.
  2. The logo and site title of the (current) ROS Discourse will be changed to reflect the broader focus of this Discourse instance, as the Open Robotics Discourse.
  3. The Open-RMF discussions from GitHub will be copied into the Open-RMF categories here, then those discussions will be closed. This will happen in the week of the 16th of June.
  4. This Discourse will have its URL changed to discourse.openrobotics.org. discourse.ros.org will be a redirect, and we are going to set up a URL rewrite so that existing links to topics and categories will correctly redirect to the same topic or category at the new URL. The timeline for this is not yet set, but the URL change will not happen until the rewrite is ready.
  5. We are working with the Discourse migrations team to migrate the data from the Gazebo Discourse into the Open Robotics Discourse. This is a paid service provided by Discourse so the timing is contingent on when they have availability. We are currently expecting it to happen in late June, and will provide an update when we have a fixed schedule. It will not happen any earlier than the middle of June.
  6. Once the Gazebo Discourse data has been migrated, that Discourse will be closed down. A URL rewriter will be set up to redirect any community.gazebosim.org links to the correct place at the Open Robotics Discourse. This will be more complex than the discourse.ros.org rewriter, but we currently hope to have it setup by the end of June.

If you are primarily using discourse.ros.org, then you should not see any disruptive changes. Direct links to categories and topics should continue to function even with the new category layout, and the URL rewriter should handle any bookmarks you have. However, please do update your bookmarks once the URL changes, as we cannot guarantee the URL rewriter will be live forever.

If you are using the Open-RMF Discussions on GitHub, you will need to register for the Open Robotics Discourse in order to continue discussing Open-RMF.

If you are using the Gazebo Discourse, there may be some disruption as the migration happens. We will keep you up to date on the schedule as we learn it.

Thank you for your consideration as we make these significant but important changes.

1 Like