I’m using Discourse for a yearly event (a preparatory course at a university), both for internal use for the organizers and for discussion among participants. This year’s event has finished, and once usage has dropped below significance, I’d be okay with shutting the installation down. Next year, however, I want to have another installation ready, and the old topics available as an archive to the organizers. This leaves multiple options, and I’m not sure what is best: Archive HTML, New Installation I could simply drop the current installation and bootstrap a new install. After copying over a few site settings, it would be mostly ready! However, I need an archive of the old posts. I could try to download the HTML view of all old posts, and offer them as an archive to the new team of organizers. This should be relatively easy, but the archive is hard to search, and you cannot link to old posts. Move Installation, New Installation I could also try to move my current installation somewhere else (a different subdomain), and leave it up and running! This would serve as a nice searchable archive where I can link to old topics, but this needs server resources and updates. I’d also need to create accounts for next year’s organizers in the old installation so they have the right permissions. I don’t think this approach really scales over multiple years. Category Permissions I could also put this year’s participants into a large group, and use category permissions to restrict access to old topics to the corresponding participants. Since I don’t want this year’s participants to see next year’s posts, I would also need to put next year’s participants into their own group – which can’t simply be done in the SSO payload. I also cannot move all current categories under a new category 2015 since Discourse doesn’t support sub-subcategories. Deleting all Topics Another idea would be to leave the forum as-is, but clean it up: delete all topics prevent SSO for this year’s participants disable all user accounts (so no-one gets mail notifications until he signs in again) The resulting Discourse installation would look mostly empty, and could be used by next year’s organizers and participants without the old users noticing. However, using the ?status=deleted query string, the organizers (all with moderator permissions) could browse the archive. I don’t see a way to allow searching these deletes posts. Hiding all Topics Similarly, I could proceed as before, but hide all topics instead of deleting them. For the organizers, this would mean that old topics are still easily available and searchable, only distinguished by the “hidden” icon. Category Archiving There’s a discussion on how category archiving should work. This might work once it is implemented, but I think it is not really tailored towards this situation. I’m interested in opinions on how to proceed. Which method is the best in this case? Did I overlook a better way?

Could you move the topics to an ‘archive’ category that is organized with tags?

Use groups, one for each year. And api to manage groups.

This is my favorite idea so far.

As you get deeper into doing this update the topic; we may want to convert some of the manual steps you take into automatic steps that Discourse can take on your behalf. Once we know what they are…

On a SSO-enabled site, if I log out a user, prevent him from signing in again via SSO, and deactivate his account, is there any way for him to interact with Discourse anymore? He should not be ably to reply by mail, should not get any new mails and be unable to re-validate his address because he cannot login, right? I am trying to kick out users that took a course last year, while ensuring that they can login again if they sign up for a new course (which grants them SSO login once again).

I think so can you verify the above words @sam? I wonder if we need a better process here, somehow.

Yes I am pretty sure that if you deactivate they will have to re-activate prior to any interaction. Be sure to test it out though.

[image] codinghorror: I wonder if we need a better process here, somehow. I’m not really sure how a better process could work. A perfect solution for me would have been a button that logs out and disables all non-staff-accounts until they log in again, without forcing them to re-validate their address if they do. But that seems extremely domain-specific…

I’m very interested in this yearly event use case, e.g. students in a class every year. I think it’s common and very useful!

Sounds great! So let me dream a bit: Add a group containing all non-staff users. Implement a new user state, let’s call it “expired” for now: Expiring a user forces a logout. Expired users cannot interact via email. Logging in once again reinstates the account, without re-validating the address. Add a way to bulk-execute admin actions on all accounts in a group (or all accounts matching an SQL query), like logout, expire, suspend, … That’s a lot of feature requests ;-), but would help with this use case and hopefully be general enough to also help in other cases.

Re-purposing a Discourse installation for a yearly event

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) October 19, 2015, 8:10pm 3

We definitely need a better archiving strategy but I am not sure what that is at the moment.

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Re-purposing a Discourse installation for a yearly event

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