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 #148
• [ ] Put the forum in maintenance mode
• [ ] Do the data migration
• [ ] Switch to the new forum