Forums Migration Update
-
Official comment
UPDATE - as of this point, the mapping is complete, so links from the old forum will point to their respective page in the new Zendesk environment.
-
Except the way I find myself onto your forums is via google searches for issues, and now all these inbound links are broken. Very Very frustrating right now.
Seems like a huge over sight, you don't get to the content you are expecting, you don't get to a useful page at all not even one trying to use your incoming link as a search to find the right content.
I'm kinda making do with Google cache - but tis not great.6 -
Oh. my. gosh. Another devastating change from cPanel. What ever happened to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage? Honestly, this is a terrible, terrible move.
- All the old posts gone. Literally decades of knowledge flicked away at the press of a button. OK so, some of it was a bit outdated, but really there were millions of posts that still had relevant knowledge.
- The new forum looks so depressing, grey, no formatting and simply - just bad.
You guys seems to be obsessed with shaking things up, but I honestly don't see what's the point in doing that, unless you make an improvement. How can wiping all the data and moving to a less user friendly model be an improvement? I'm dumbfounded really and just sad again that what was once my go to partner in webhosting has disintegrated.
3 -
Sorry, but I'm not digging the new forum.
Seems very limited as far as information/settings and certainly not as robust of a UI as Xenforo.
I understand the reasoning for moving to Zendesk, but not a fan at all.
2 -
Graphically I don't like the new forum :(
I find it very limited
2 -
cPRex thank you for all the babysitting you do here for us! Please never think it's not appreciated.
2 -
cPanel learning the joy of hosted applications where you don't have access to the database back end. Priceless :-)
2 -
What a mess this is, you ruined perfectly good forum with this move. I had to register a new account because this damn system does not send out new password when requesting new password. This is a major downgrade in my opinion. Awful.
2 -
I think this decision is a mistake from cpanel and another example of blatantly riding roughshod over customer wishes (we didn't even get a vote!). It seems the cPanel / WHM server software could be equally at risk from poor decision making too?
I can see the benefit of having support tickets and forum posts connected - but you can do it using Discourse too. In comparison, Cloudflare and Virtualmin moved to Discourse which I find really useful and easy to use: https://forum.virtualmin.com/t/what-forum-module-applicaiotn-does-virtualmin-use/118166
At least restore the old posts and get rid of this sickly gray (depressing)
2 -
This change is pure garbage and everyone at cPanel should be embarrassed. This is not a real modern robust forum. Doesn't keep you logged in. Doesn't give you any indication of new posts or read posts. Nothing is easy to use or find regarding my prior posts.
Tried editing my Profile to change my photo and that doesn't even work. Click and nothing happens.
This is amateurish at best and seems to be just a way for cPanel staff to be lazier and not have to keep apprised with what the userbase is discussing unless it's forced into something more akin to a support ticket system where features are non-existing and not required.
Likely also a way to cut down on cPanel staff, just you unfortunate workers haven't been informed you're on the way to being laid off.
Welcome to Baby's First Forum.
2 -
This is not really a forum.
This is a ticket system that dreams of being a forum.
Some "product manager" saw the "forum" description and they decided that it's enough for that checkbox to be filled in.
You can't even quote someone's post (in full or partial).
2 -
Hey everyone! Thanks for all the feedback over the weekend. I'll address these in a list below to ensure I get everything I can.
mtindor - The "new posts since last visit" issue is also something I miss. I reached out to Zendesk and created this case with their team:
so hopefully they'll be able to tweak that. I do like their features of "official comment" so it pins things to the top of the reply list. In the mean time, I've just been going to the bottom of the home page, clicking the "See More" button a few times so it goes back 24 hours, and then reading through all those. So far, that has kept me from missing anything new.
There are internal benefits for us to using this tool instead of Xenforo. The option for administrators to create a ticket as well as the "similar threads" recommendations that appear are both very helpful features to have.
Like I mentioned earlier, are are planning to add more data to include information from pre-2018. We just wanted to make sure this initial batch of data was working properly, as well as the old link mapping, before we proceeded with a, potentially, even larger data migration.
Unnamed user - would you believe it's the exact same gray as the old forums? We pulled the hex color value of the gray background and moved it here. What IS missing from this is the lighter gray delineation around each block of text - we're going to see if we can spiff this up a bit.
lmstearn - thanks, that makes sense to me. Only modern threads, not just replies in them, were moved over. We ran into some issues with the "Make your introduction here" thread as it has over 5000 posts, but that's on the agenda for tomorrow.
rainboy - I'm not seeing any issues with the search at this time. All my searches point to the new cPanel Forums. If there are pre-2018 posts, as of this time those have not been moved, but newer search results should point to their respective page here.
clopezi - Yes, there was extensive testing done before the switch. As with any major migration, we hit a few glitches, but I am extremely happy with how the work went. If you have specific complaints, I'm happy to see what I can do!
kdean - Ultimately, I think I might agree that it's "not a forum" - Zendesk markets this as a "community" and with the ability to link to our internal ticket system and article system, I think that's a good description.
The one thing I didn't hear back on over the weekend was the avatars, but I'm still looking into that.
I also promise this isn't some weird way of cutting staff, and I'm not really sure what that means. I'm not going anywhere, and I'm alway here for your feedback. Ultimately, you're typing to me, I'm typing back, an we're interacting in a community and that's what matters.
Bogdan I. - see the kdean reply above, mostly. Yes, I hate the quote thing too, and I'm going to reach out to them as soon as I'm doe typing this reply to see if there is something they can do with that.
ITHKBO - I haven't sat down and made such a list yet, although I suppose I could? The create ticket function is reserved for admins, as that'll be up to me to decide when that happens.
The function itself is actually very cool, both for us internally and for the public. When we create a ticket, the post doesn't get removed but a banner gets added to the post showing the ticket number. On my end, I can click the link and get taken directly to our side of the ticket system - the end user gets taken to their side. This allows me to track the issue without having to do a bunch of manual work on my end, and then when the ticket is resolved I can post a summary like I usually do.
In general though, what you see available is what we have - they aren't any tools that we just aren't enabling on our side.
EVERYONE: You guys all know me by now, and I'm here for you. I'm not going anywhere, and I'll be here to take your feedback.
2 -
Hi cPRex and team, just a few questions,
1) WTF is wrong with you guys, what do you smoke over there?
2) Are there any plans to restore the actual CONTENTS of the posts? A lot of the posts/answers are cut mid-sentence or just empty, I'll give you a couple of examples if you're blissfully unaware -- these are fresh, not 10 years old:
https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/19163954559511-Custom-DNSAdmin-module-What-are-companyids
https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/19164337288855-dnsadmin-testing
3) How about keeping the OG forum locked for posting but actually running, for posterity?Thank you
2 -
I do know some of the content just couldn't be imported properly, and we just didn't have a workaround that would ensure all types of text would get moved seamlessly. Like I mentioned earlier in this thread, we tried to choose the option that was compatible with the most data we could find, but it was never going to be perfect.While this is a good answer, it doesn't really answer the question. I fail to see why you couldn't have kept the old forum - if it 'aint broke don't fix it. I know you'll say you wanted to combine support tickets with forum / community posts - and I also know that it's hard for people to admit when they are wrong...Honestly, while the fees are going up, it feels like this part at least - is going down / backwards..... Thank god the support team are still really great.But really, this whole 'forum' debacle really makes me question the strategy you guys have adopted and it concerns me to see such an experienced company decide on something like this, knowing full well there would be a huge loss of information to so many users. Thousands of links I come across are still all broken, unformatted and missing critical information pertinent to the thread. To some extent, you might as well not have bothered to do a migration of the old data!Grumbling aside, I'm grateful to you cPRex for at least keeping us in the loop.2
-
Webdew - this may still be something we configure. We need to ensure that all the data on the new forum will not change again (there's still a few missing posts we're going to deal with tomorrow) and then we can see what the options are for mapping old URLs to new pages. Unfortunately with the way things are configured there just wasn't a way to do that in advance, but we're going to see if we can make it happen!
1 -
Thanks - if I'm looking at the right thing, that should be one of the ones fixed tomorrow as that is post-2018. If I'm not looking at the right thing, post the title of the thread here so I can look it up.
I'm going to see if we can do another 4ish years of data when things settle down after this initial move :D. No guarantees, don't quote me, but I'll try!
1 -
vatra - I've said multiple times this is happening.
EthernetServers - yeah, my profile got broken in the move as it got used for a lot of testing. It'll get fixed. I'm pretty sure I still work here, though. Until it's fixed, I can't give myself the Staff badge either. I'm not sure what you mean by tagging people though? There are issues with broken links in some areas, and we'll fix them as we find them, but some just couldn't be directly moved no matter what we tried due to encoding issues.
1 -
There just has to be somebody on these forums, and even AT cPanel, who thinks these new forums are garbage. You can't find anything. New Posts since last visit do not stand out. All of the historical knowledge passed along on the forums is gone. How in the world could anybody think this was a good idea? And what in the world did somebody at cPanel think was so wrong with the existing forums?
What we have now is not forum software. The only thing this change accomplishes is that cPanel staff do not have to monitor it anymore because nobody wants to post. What a setback. The featureset is like 1/10th (or less) than the old forums. It's like stepping back 20 years.
1 -
Honestly, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand this move from a company with polished software like cPanel.
Did anyone try this before the switch or did the new owners just not care at all? The community is an important part of what cPanel is all about...
1 -
Bogdan I. - here's the case for that quoting behavior I created just now - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/6457749302938-Improved-quote-function-for-Zendesk-Community
1 -
Glad to see the Jurassic Moderator is back in business ;)
1 -
@cPRex found it, but seems i was always scrolled down a bit and did not notice it.
1 -
AzeDK - I don't think show - a quick search of all Zendesk docs for "Gravatar" didn't find anything, so it's not natively supported. We are working on making those changeable, though!
1 -
Jose Dieguez - the account is based on the email address. You would need to be using the same email address you were on the old Forum in order for the data to be linked to your new account.
As far as the account creation date that some have mentioned, it is the creation date *inside Zendesk* - not your original account Forum creation date. Even my own personal account only shows as 2019.
1 -
UPDATE - we are currently importing threads going back to September 2013. This means that if you are watching an area in general, such as Backups, you are going to get a notification of every new thread that is created. Unfortunately we don't have a way to stop that behavior on our side.
This work will likely take a few days to complete, but I'll be sure to post an update once it's done!
1 -
There is no messaging function built in to Zendesk, and from what I understand that is not something they will be adding to the product.
I did mention the quoting issue earlier, and have a case opened with them here about this: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/6457749302938-Improved-quote-function-for-Zendesk-Community
Yes, the arrows are the closest we have to an "upvote" option.
1 -
UPDATE: We have completed the migration of data going back to September 2013. We have picked that date because it was the EOL date of cPanel 11.32, and I doubt anything before that is going to be relevant.
We are working on the database map now, so old links will be taken care of back to that date soon.
We do not plan to migrate even older data at this time.
There will likely be threads I didn't get to reply to because Zendesk shows there are 26,000 new posts right now, so if I missed your thread or a reply or a question, I'm very sorry. There shouldn't be any more interruptions with the Forum from this point forward.
1 -
cPRex hope you can map those old URLs as loosing all that past data will only add to your tech support workloads versus folks Googling a issue or problem and landing on a solution that is populated on the forums already! Though the new SSO is so confusing - you'd probably loose a lot of active forum members and folks that just don't bother to sign up on the forums to ask questions and just add to your ticket workload instead.
There are internal benefits for us to using this tool instead of Xenforo. The option for administrators to create a ticket as well as the "similar threads" recommendations that appear are both very helpful features to have.
1 -
cPRex: Thanks for the update!
Sad to say there is still a post missing from this thread, mentioned above, the google cache has now expired, and the quote tags are still not parsed by the import.
The archived page won't show it either:
Could be the additional two posts were made during the actual migration event, and lost forever, so any hope?
The content prior to 2013 still may have relevance to some, a good deal of it appears to be archived - see:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://forums.cpanel.net/threads*
Capped by the 10,000 limit, unfortunately unless someone with categorising filter skills steps in. :)
1 -
Sure - I'd do a ticket and then we can check out your account.
1
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
122 comments