Update Community section

[harry-cpp]

[tomspilman]

Currently we have the community page pointing to the existing community site.

This works for now, but we need to decide on if we're changing the community over to some other system like GitHub Discussions or not.

[AristurtleDev]

One thing to consider if switching to GitHub discussions is the history of posts in the current community forums. There is a wealth of information there from questions answered by people and other tutorial/guide posts made. There are ways to export from Discourse and import into the GitHub discussions in order to retain the history of information. I don't know how it would work in terms of linking the user that posted it with the user on GitHub, but it might be something worth looking into https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/48278

[ThomasFOG]

Migrating the current content over a new service is likely to break links and currently SEO'd pages (at least for a time; and google doesn't like duplicated content, it will tend to give a lower score to the new forum if it has copied content). I believe that it would be better to archive the current forums (putting them in read-only with a disclaimer) and let people start discussions over github. We wouldn't be loosing content and SEO would remain untouched. We would have to make sure that the archive is fully locked to avoid security holes.

[KelsamGames]

Not that I have a dog in this race, but FWIW I also think archiving is the way to go if moving away from Discourse. However, if you wanted to, as a part of whatever script would be written to migrate existing posts to Github Discussions you could pretty easily have it generate a set of 301 redirects that you could host on the existing web server. This would ensure all links would still work (they'd be redirected to the newly generated Discussions page for a given topic), and would keep SEO intact.

[ThomasFOG]

That's interesting to know, I'm not very web-proficient and didn't know about this option which seems relevant.

[AristurtleDev]

you could pretty easily have it generate a set of 301 redirects that you could host on the existing web serve

This issue here is now that the website is hosted through GitHub pages, only the www domain exists (https://www.monogame.net and https://monogame.net)

As far as I'm aware, the GitHub pages for MonoGame isn't configured for subdomains, and to create redirects for the discourse sites, we'd need to be able to generate redirect pages that live at https://community.monogame.net/ subdomain and redirect to the appropriate discussions page.

So this would be possible, but one of the maintainers would need to setup the repository's settings to also use subdomains.

[KelsamGames]

You can add a CNAME record at the domain level for the 'community' subdomain to "redirect" (nickname / canonical name / alias) to the non-subdomain-ed domain. This is normally what people do to get 'www.' to go to the base domain (i.e. add a CNAME record for 'www' with the value of 'mydomain.com'). Then you can just host your redirects like normal from '/whatever/path/it/was' to '/whatever/path/it/is/now' without concern for the domain/subdomain because it'll all come to the same place.

[AristurtleDev]

@KelsamGames so the CNAME just needs to be in the repo? Sorry I haven't done a ton of hosting though GitHub pages. Was thinking more of the traditional route of adding A Records for subdomains like I do with hosting on digital ocean.

[KelsamGames]

CNAME is managed in a domain's DNS records. So usually wherever the domain is registered. A records are another type of DNS record, so you should be able to manage CNAME records in the same place. I haven't ever used GitHub pages/hosting, so I can't speak to that.

[ThomasFOG]

@tomspilman is the person who has access to DNS configuration if need be.

[tomspilman]

Catching up to this discussion now @mrhelmut @KelsamGames @AristurtleDev .

So what do we want to redirect to community.monogame.net ?

It already is pointing to the Discourse site. Are we wanting to change that?

[AristurtleDev]

@tomspilman

@KelsamGames was suggesting that when/if the Discourse forums are exported into the GitHub discussions, that a map be generated that is a listing key-value pair of {discourse-post-url, github-disussion-post-url}

With the direct map, we could then create HTTP 301 redirect pages at the discourse-post-url that redirects to the github-discussion-post-url it maps too.

In order to do this, there will need to be a community.monogame.net subdomain setup were all those redirects live. I'm not sure at the moment if this would be as simple as something like adding it to the website repo and a CNAME configuration file in the repo, or if more steps would need to be involved and like creating a redirect specific repository and having the DNS point the subdomain to that repository.