The old community, gone?

[Dan Aistrop]

Whilst myself, I wasn't apart of the old community (the old forums before these ones) but it's recently come to my attention that years of work on the old forums with many answers to common or difficult questions have gone. It seems from the looks of it that when you hit the old forums, it'll auto redirect to the new ones with no archive functionality in place.

It's bad for SEO reasons, but even worse when a whole archive of questions with valuable answers have gone. Is there no way to bring this back or import into the new forums? It seems crazy to remove such a wealth of knowledge from the community like this. Thoughts on this matter?

[Stuart M]

I second this. Are you planning to make the old forum available on an archive URL or do you plan to import the posts?

There was years and years of information on there that was still very much valid and used by people. I even have some pages bookmarked because the content was so valuable...

[Dan Aistrop]

Completely agree with your suggest of an archive URL. Even if it's kept read-only and removed after a year, there should be a transitional period where we can keep things from the old site we thought were valuable. Suddenly changing over meant no one was prepared.

[Magento_Host]

WOW all posts gone from old forum. We had a few posts that tried to help the community AND subscriptions from posts that we found very useful. We hope Magento resurfices these in what ever medum they choose as they were extremely helpful.

Suprised they didnt integrate OR migrate those old posts into the new forums...

[JLHC]

This is what Piotr (pikaminskimage) stated in Twitter:-

https://twitter.com/piotrekkaminski/status/578232219707158528

Personally I do agree that the old forum should be archived and be accessible publicly as it has a lot of valuable information. There will be bad answers here and there but there are also a lot of useful answers. 

[PlacementEdge]

I can't wrap my mind around why they would toss out the old forum like that. ~2 years of downtime to come up with a strategy and they sign up with Lithium and toss out the old posts.

The only thing I can think of is that every technical Magento question you could ask has already been answered on Stack Exchange, so they aren't too concerned with using this as a repository for solutions. Maybe the programming section should just link to magento.stackexchange.com lol

[magento_rich]

Hi all, as a workaround.. Internet Archive scraped most of the old Magento forum content. Please take a look..

https://web.archive.org/web/*/magentocommerce.com/boards

[peterjaap]

Please, please, please do not bring back the old forums. Not in an archived way or whatever form. As Piotr already stated in the referenced, the old forums were terrible. Terrible advice, outdated advice and just plain wrong advice. People will take that advice and we don't want that. Starting all new is the best thing this community could've gotten.

[Dan Aistrop]

I don't think the old forums had out of date answer and things are just wrong, I think it's a good legacy to keep so you can reference back to old posts if you had one saved and need to go back. Completely removing the forums just seems wrong. Not to mention search results simply redirect to the homepage of the forums. Not helpful really.

[CreativeWest]

10,000s of hours of people providing solutions and they go up in a puff of smoke, had to rely on Google Cache. Not a very good sign.