If you switch to Discourse is it possible to still use old style BB for up to 90 days( for example) while members get used to to new forum software.
So esentially have a choice to use either forum for up to 90 days, then switch everyone to Discourse when 90 days expire
That's the plan.
#1 Login via BTSX accounts.
Do not go to discourse... Simple Machines is known, familiar, and such a massive change would surely drive off people.
We can keep SMF on in parallel and just make it the old forum non-crawlable. This way we won;t get penalized by Google. Messages and users from both platforms can be in sync.
The current forum is terrible for SEO and user conversion. The Google analytics data is abysmal in terms of bounce rate and signup rate.
Essentially people who already use the forum are hardcore users and get online every day. New visitors form social media and organic search rarely convert. We have managed other forums before and this is among the strangest conversion dynamics we have ever seen.
It seems that there are two personas interested in Bitshares:
- 90s techies with old school forum and IRC experience
- 2000s techies and semi-techies with social media and real-time web experience
The latter don't sign up or don't come back to the forum due to the UI/UX rather than the content.
This also means that there would be little to no added value for us starting a social media or SEO campaign for the forum or Bitshares content because the conversion rate of the forum would be the bottleneck. This is the primary reason why we would switch to Discourse. However, depending on our test results we might use something else too.
Furthermore it turns out that it's super difficult to do the readable link conversion on SMF without losing "link juice", while Discourse has that by default.
All that said, we are still in the research phase.