Migration of Acceptable Ads Proposal forum board to Discourse

[innerself]

Background

We want to migrate the Acceptable Ads Proposal board from phpBB to it's own separate Discourse instance. It will be likely hosted on a separate server and have it's own domain / be a part of the acceptableads.org domain.

This is one part of the ongoing effort to make the whitelisting process more transparent. We want the discussion around acceptable ads to be more open than it is currently and using Discourse should help.

This depends on ticket #1327, because we first need to test the migration process and ticket #1614 as the Discourse puppet module needs to be improved.

Migration of the Acceptable Ads Proposal forum is a relatively simple case, with fewer posts than most of the forums, so it will serve as a good step before later migrating the rest of the forums to Discourse.

What to change

We need to create a new Discourse instance on it's own server and migrate all the AA forum posts over to it from phpBB.

Migration of user accounts is not essential, but, active users of the forum should at least be notified about the migration by email.

Once the migration has been completed and the new Discourse server is running @innerself (Manu) will create new categories needed, and otherwise configure things before it goes live.

The new Discourse instance will need to be configured to work with it's own domain / one of the Acceptable ads domains once the exact domain has been decided.