We migrated our Ask LibreOffice instance to Discourse during the first week-end of August 2021. If you used our AskBot instance before, here is a short FAQ regarding that migration and its shortcomings.
I’m locked out from my account
We gave instructions to help us with a smooth migration of AskBot’s user database. In case you missed these, you might have to do following extra steps in order to regain access to your AskLibO account.
You’ll need an account on our Single Sign-On platform with the very same email address you used for AskBot. The SSO username doesn’t need to match, but if you use a different email address then a new account will be created and you will still be locked out from your former account! (Should that happen please get in touch with the infrastructure team immediately so we can merge the duplicate.)
To verify that all is well, visit your SSO profile page and double check that you see Askbot in the “Linked Profiles” section along with your primary email address. If that’s the case, then you should automatically regain access to former account on log in.
I can’t log in with my AskBot credentials
AskBot and our Single Sign-On platform have different authentication backends: if you don’t already have an SSO account then you’ll need to create one (with a matching address as written above).
My account was renamed
Unfortunately Discourse and AskBot have different restrictions on usernames and we had to rename a lot of profiles in order to weed out spaces and other invalid characters.
AskBot profiles that could be linked to Single Sign-On before the migration were renamed to the SSO username.
If you try to sign up a username that belongs to someone else (or is another profile of yours with a different email address, see above), Discourse resolves the collision by automatically appending (or incrementing) a number.
I lost all my karma (reputation) and badges :’-(
Unfortunately AskBot karma and badges don’t translate well to the Discourse world. Discourse Badges are used and assigned differently.
In order to bootstrap the site — and compensate for the karma loss — existing AskBot users have been assigned a Trust Level using the following made-up heuristic:
- TL4 for users with karma ≥1000 who were last seen in the past year;
- TL3 for users with karma ≥250 who posted at least 100 answers and were last seen in the past year;
- TL2 for users who posted at least 100 answers/comments;
- TL1 for users who have at least 5 posts (questions/answers/comments) and were last seen at least 10 days after their joined date; and
- TL0 for everyone else.
I lost my notification settings and saved searches
Sadly we couldn’t find a sane way to import these. As far as notification is concerned each imported account have been assigned the following default settings:
- send an email when someone uses @username or quotes or replies to a post of yours, but only if Discourse hasn’t seen you in the last 10 minutes;
- no daily/weekly/monthly email digest of popular topics and replies;
- auto-track a question after spending 4 minutes reading; and
- auto-track questions you have posted to.
Notification settings can be configured in your profile.
I lost my read list and the list of posts up/down-voted
Sadly we couldn’t find a sane way to import these. Global view and upvote counts have been preserved, but the fine-grained details were lost in translation.
The import is incomplete
Our focus was on questions, answers, and comments; all of these have been imported (attachments included) and should be properly attributed. However some other bits were lost in during the migration. In addition to what’s been spelled out above, lost data include:
- deleted/abandoned posts;
- post revisions (only the most recent revision of each published post were imported);
- most of user profile details (country, bio, twitter, etc.); and
- user accounts that didn’t post anything (or only deleted/abandoned posts).
I can’t upvote a question/comment anymore, nor downvote any post at all
Only answers can be upvoted, other post types can’t. There is a feature request to downvote answers, but AFAIK this isn’t available yet.
Feel free to poke the staff if you have any other question about the migration.