Back when Direct2Dell turned two, I hinted at some changes we've been working on—integrating blogs, forums and wikis in a single platform. We're getting close to go time. Getting ready for the new site will impact most of our English blogs and all of our Dell Community Forum, so I wanted to take a few minutes to explain what’s happening.
If all proceeds as planned, we will start migrating all of our threads, posts, ranks, user information, blogs and comments from Direct2Dell, etc. over to the new platform beginning on Friday at 5pm CST. The new site is planned to launch on November 7th.
We've got a lot of content to move, so running the migration scripts will take some time. Our forum has been live for over 9 years with millions of users and threads. And in just over two years, we've had almost 900 Direct2Dell posts and about 15,000 comments.
Once those migration scripts start, anything new that is posted on our forum (threads and posts), new user accounts created, etc. will not get migrated over. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to capture new information while the script is running.
Dell Community Forum users: you will see threads like the one in the image below on all of the main boards to explain what’s going on:
So what does this mean to Direct2Dell readers? During the migration, we will temporarily disable comments for all English Direct2Dell blogs beginning at 5pm CST Friday. They will remain disabled until we're able to launch the new integrated Community Server 2008 site.
We will disable all blog comments for all English blogs except for the following in the list below. All of Dell's non-English blogs will not be affected.
However, since we still want to hear from you during this time, we've created a board called Community Upgrade. We can’t launch this board until after the migration begins. When we do, I will update this post with the link.
And if you're a customer who needs help from Dell Support, please select an option from our Contact Us page.
Lots more details to come. Beginning next week, we'll be explaining functionality of the new site to give you a better understanding of what to expect. I apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience during the migration process. We will move forward as quickly as we can to bring you the new site.