Astaro.org

Email is the unique key - same email address, same user. That's not the difficult part. This is what we did when we migrated the the posts from our two other forums to this community. And yes, we'll move all the posts - good, bad, ugly.

Just to say it again, we never wanted this to happen like it has. I talked openly, and it's no secret (ask for example Bob and BarryG about the discussions I had on Astaro.org), that we were in the planning stage of decommissioning the Astaro.org site as we needed all three forums to come together and benefit from being in one place. I wish the full thread was there right now, but for what it's worth this is a link to one of the discussions I had www.astaro.org/.../54613-forum-admins-do-you-know-vbulletin-3-8-6-now-end-life-security-threat.html. There were one or two others in the hidden moderators board also. We recognized that forum was a mature, happy (maybe just fairly contented for some), well organized community of peer-to-peer members helping each other, and that the site has a ton of information (over 700,000 pages) that everyone relied on. Hence we didn't rush the migration - we kept delaying it. The discussion started in February. We knew it had to come and that we probably would upset some users if not handled right as a change like this is more an art than a science. So we asked for feedback and comments before proceeding. We were busy planning the content migration, user profile migration, the group and board structure, and prioritizing features needed for the site so we could show that we're listening and that the software platform the community runs on will be developed for its users and then - bang.

So none of us wants this situation but here's where we find ourselves. How do we make it right. How do we move forwards. Bob continues to be excellent by providing suggestions and comments on this site and others are doing the same - I want to thank all of them. For starters we need more forums (boards) in the UTM group of the community so posts on different topics can be separated from each other. That's something we can do immediately, and I'll start a thread to discuss that and get opinions. We are still working on getting the full content of Astaro.org back up, and we're working on getting it migrated, along with user profiles, to this group so it's in one place. As with all software, there are a set of bug fixes and features we want to release and are working on those too.

P.S. I don't wear a suit.

"Email is the unique key - same email address, same user. "

Except when it isn't? I'm the same user (or am I?) but I am not using the same email address.

ruckus, first off, thanks for answering the questions and glad to hear you don't wear a suit.

If email is key then don't you think you might want to let people know that when they're signing up, like a warning to use the same email?

Which leads me to my next question... what email did I use? I've got no frickin' idea because I have many aliases which route to my primary. And I had no reason to make note of this because it wasn't my user name on the old forum.

I know, I'll just go to the old forum and look it up, oh wait... I can't! You see the problem here?

Now what, what if I figure out what my old email address is and it isn't the one I picked on the new forum? If I change my username to something else to free it up, will it free it up to be used with the correct one?

Hi SWGOCI,

Good point about the warning - article updated. You should register with Sophos ID using the previous email address (can't remember? Hint: a________e@s__g____l.__t) and then change your user name - you'll have to change the existing log in to something else (like add a 1) and then your username should be freed up.

ruckus, this was very helpful and is much appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to look up that email for me too.

I concur with the general consensus that this could not have been handled more poorly and is completely backwards from how it should have been handled. I don't know how much of a hand you had in this process, but at least you're trying to make amends, and that goes a long way in my book.

Hopefully Sophos will make good on reviving ALL of the previous content that BAlfson and others so graciously contributed. Were it not for people like him on the old forum and my reseller, I would have never purchased our units after evaluating them. If Sophos does NOT make good on this I can assure Sophos they'll lose revenue over this.

In fact my renewal is just around the corner and I'm holding off for now just to see if this claim of putting content back is kept. A company is only as good as their word.

ruckus, this was very helpful and is much appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to look up that email for me too.

I concur with the general consensus that this could not have been handled more poorly and is completely backwards from how it should have been handled. I don't know how much of a hand you had in this process, but at least you're trying to make amends, and that goes a long way in my book.

Hopefully Sophos will make good on reviving ALL of the previous content that BAlfson and others so graciously contributed. Were it not for people like him on the old forum and my reseller, I would have never purchased our units after evaluating them. If Sophos does NOT make good on this I can assure Sophos they'll lose revenue over this.

In fact my renewal is just around the corner and I'm holding off for now just to see if this claim of putting content back is kept. A company is only as good as their word.

Article about migration states... " It may take us several days to complete the restore with the full site content being available next week."

We're coming up on two weeks, where's our stuff?

Astaro Update #1

Thanks for working and communicating with me on what you’d like to see happen with the Astaro migration. I’ve been working with my teams across Sophos and I would like to share the latest news.

Mid-December 2015
This initial release will be focused on migrating all the data from Astaro.org to Sophos Community
- All Astaro boards – posts, images, registration details, views etc.. - will be migrated to the Sophos UTM 9 group in a very similar structure as Astaro as discussed
o All language boards and any board without a post from November 2015 will be put into a read-only state as discussed
- Email notifications will be available so that you can quickly follow up on posts. Be sure your notification settings are up-to-date.

Late January – early February
The second release will improve the User Experience and User Interface of Sophos Community. More to follow!
- Search improvements to help you discover information and content that is relevant to you
- Pagination feature to better browse through pages of content in each group
- Full text editor will be available by default. This will improve the UX to easily post logs, screenshots, images and emoticons etc…
- Summary of new posts (eg. created in the last 24 hours) or unread posts of specific groups you are interested in. This was available in Astaro and we want to bring this feature back
- Improving the breadcrumb in each community group when navigating to and from the Knowledge Base
- Fix the private message setting to allow users to set the option to Allow private message from Everyone.

My team or I will continue to provide updates as they are made available and hope this information is helpful. Please continue to provide feedback because this community can only grow and mature with your input.

Thank you, Mr. Anderson. :)

Would it help if we as Sophos customers expressed interest in this project to our Sophos Team Support?

Thanks for this Michael,
Please also make the typo SMALLER, it is so confusing right now with theese big letters in the posts view, it's difficult to get a helicopter perspective right now ;)