I have some exciting news to announce regarding a ‘new dawn’ for the IGKT Forums. I’m @pacharanero (Marcus Baw) a freelance Discourse forum specialist.
THE ‘ARCHIVE FORUM’
As some of you may know, the ‘Archive’ Forum (https://forum.igkt.net/) is quite old and technically falling apart, it is an SMF2 forum, which is pretty old and dated looking. Password resets on the Archive forum have I believe been broken for some time meaning some users are locked out.
THE ‘NEW FORUM’
A few years ago during the website rebuild, we also ended up with a second forum (known as the ‘New Forum’) at New Forum - IGKT which is based on Joomla! and although it’s much more visually pleasing, the lack of the archive content limited its usefulness. The New Forum didn’t really take off (it has had 82 posts in over 2 years), at least in part because much of the important historic content was on the Archive Forum, and because of this the Archive forum could never really be shut down. It is also impossible to post on the New Forum unless you are an IGKT member, which again limited its international adoption.
THE IGKT DISCOURSE FORUM
Over the past few months I have been working with the IGKT team to migrate ALL the old content from the Archive Forum, as well as ALL the content from the New Forum, into a brand new and much nicer and newer Discourse forum. This work is now ‘as complete as we can get it’ - we have all the text content, users, categories, and most of the attachments and images migrated over. Some attachments were lost forever inside the SMF2 server, there is nothing we can do about this apart from try to repair or re-attach any lost images. I have done this work for free as I am an IGKT member and wanted to help get the Guild out of the ‘limbo’ situation of being trapped between two forums, neither of which are properly working.
HOW TO ACCESS THE NEW FORUM
Go to https://discourse.igkt.net/
If you already have an account on this Archive forum then you already have an account on the Discourse forum then you only need to reset your password and you should be able to regain access to the account.
FEEDBACK AND SUPPORT!
If you have feedback on the New/Archive/Discourse forum and plans, please put it on Discoursehttps://discourse.igkt.net/ because I probably won’t see it anywhere else. (I only have temporary access to this Admin account here)
If you are having problems accessing the new forum we will try to help on a best-efforts basis wherever you post the issue.
We need helpers to help us develop, moderate, and improve the new forum, so if you would like to volunteer PM me at https://discourse.igkt.net/
Be nice - this work was all done for free because we all needed a good IGKT Forum, fit for 2025 and beyond!
Yes many thanks and well done Marcus - smile
I just do not will not use X (previouly known as Twitter) or ANY other ‘open’ so called SOCIAL media app/network so you will not receive any to your @:
I wonder if you can send me email only when a new topic is posted. Seeing all the Thank You replies to the topic in my emails is not really valuable. But anyway, thank you, Marcus.
Nice to see all the old posts, and being able to search your own old posts is nice too.
Thank you for bringing the forum back to life.
A nice alternative to FB; where everything is so difficult to find five minutes after seeing it
Will Scott (SS369) remain as the moderator? Or are there new appointed moderators?
In my opinion, the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ forum should be deleted so there is just one coherent and functional knot forum.
As it currently stands, there are 3 forums - which only creates confusion and chaos. NOTE: I am not blaming you or anyone else for the current status quo of having 3 forums. Collapsing everything into one cohesive and functional forum should be the end goal. This of course assumes that all data from the ‘old’ forum has been successfully migrated…
YES - We will probably want to allow a few months for the community to make certain that we haven’t missed out anything in the old forum when we migrated over. Then it’ll be deleted or archived and no longer at forum.igkt.net. That URL will redirect to this forum. For any regularly used broken links we can create permalinks to redirect to the same topic in the discourse forum, but this is a manual process.
YES - again we just want to ensure all the content was properly migrated. Contact me if anything seems missing. Then we will just switch off that forum section of the website.
@SS369 has made contact with me and is a moderator, yes. However I’m very keen to get a few more mods on board so we have a small team, it spreads the work and it makes it more inclusive. It also provides us with a support group between us mods - if we have to take difficult decisions (eg removing a user) then it’s a collegiate decision. The moderators will be appointed by and responsible to their community here.
Very happy to help. As an IGKT member for 10+ years and someone who rund forums professionally for about the same length of time I felt I should try to help out. The IGKT organising team and trustees have been very welcoming of the help.
Yes I hope we can draw some users back to the forums from Facebook. But there is no reason that the Facebook group can’t continue to coexist. As you say it’s very hard to find stuff on Facebook even when you KNOW it’s there.
For this forum, we want it to develop into the most comprehensive and searchable knotting reference and knowledge base on the planet. For example, I have plans to create a ‘Master Topic’ for each ABOK number, essentially building on and linking together all that ABOK knowledge with other knotters’ writings and work.
Discourse has pretty good search, and there is some work in progress to improve it further, as well as some additional plugins we can experiment with:
Um, probably not. What would each of those do for the community? I’ve heard of some of them, but I guess we can’t do all the things…
Fediverse stuff is amazing technically but in most cases has not yet caught on enough to be a thing we put a lot of effort into. That said, I’m not in charge, so if you think it’s needed, do it!
I haven’t tried posting anything with pictures to the new forum yet, the most annoying thing about the old forum was having to resize, resize, resize until your post was acceptable to be posted. The joy of Instagram (and presumably PixelFed, haven’t tried it) is the ability to just dump in your pix and then the system takes care of the size (friction reduction).
If the Guild membership requirement is relaxed for the new forum then Mastodon/Lemmy would be unnecessary.
PeerTube would be interesting for the Guild since the videos would be ad-free.
The maximum upload size for this forum is 120MB and the max image size is 20MB. That should do for starters, and you shouldn’t have any problems with images being to large to upload. Some smaller videos will be able to be uploaded (they will display in a video player in Discourse) and we can tweak as we go.
It’s better to have the attachments here in the forum where space allows, than have them outlinked and then get link rot.
Thanks for the info on those self-hostable/fediverse options - we could potentially look into those if needed in the future.
On the issue of forum access to non-members - the IGKT definitely want this to be open access to all, as the Archive forum used to be. They recognise that the members-only website forum thing was a backward step.
Hello pacharanero, thank you for all your valuable work with respect to the new forum development.
With all the respect, difficult decisions, are not necessarily the right decisions and should not be effortlessly taken.
Of course, i’m refering to Xarax’s case, and i still fail to understand the reasons, for which a permanent block had to be inflicted on the greatest knotting mind of our time, with so many offerings to the old forum.
Let us not forget, that his banishment, created a huge gap from a contribution perspective as well as a " wave of escapism", entraining many other talented knot enthusiasts to follow him, or rendering them inactive or less inclined to post.
If you really looking forward to a new knotting era, or expecting to draw new members from other platforms or old members to come back, i strongly recommend to reconsider reinstating his membership.
This is strictly my personal opinion, i have not communicated with Xarax for quite some time now, and i can not be sure about his intensions of getting back.
Well, the main focus for me is to build the forum back to being a useful resource and community. There is work to be done and a certain amount of rebuilding of community.
In regard hypotheticals like ‘what if [any previously banned user] were to come back?’ - if they were keen to contribute and were going to stick to the community’s shared values then there would probably be allowed an opportunity to return. But then there may be others (eg those who had to deal with the removal last time) who might feel differently.
