Lessons from migrating a ten-year-old forum

Over the holidays we finished a migration I'd been dreading for months: a hobby forum with ten years of threads, several thousand members and a lot of strong feelings about change. The data part went fine. The people part is where the real lessons were.

Announce early, then announce again

We told members six weeks in advance, then again at four weeks, two weeks and the day before. Even so, some regulars were surprised on the day. There's no such thing as over-communicating a migration.

Bring the history with you

• Old threads, with their original dates and authors, mattered more than any new feature. Long-time members went looking for their first posts within an hour of launch.
• Keep the old URLs redirecting. Years of search results and bookmarks point at them.
• Carry accounts over and let people set a new password, rather than asking everyone to sign up again.

Don't redesign the culture at the same time

The site looked different, so we kept everything else the same: the same section names, the same moderators, the same guidelines. A new platform is enough change for one month. Improvements can come once people feel at home again.

Plan for the first week

We had a pinned "where did everything go?" thread, two moderators on each shift and a short daily update. Most questions were about notification settings, so we wrote a quick how-to on day two. The grumbling faded by the end of the week, and the first full week after launch was about as busy as a normal week before the move.

Planning a move onto UNA yourself? Our checklist runs to three pages, and every line on it is there because something went wrong once. Ask and I'll send you a copy.