Boost our forums with AI – Gentoo Linux

It turned out to be an April Fool’s post. See for the actual upgrade announcement here.

The Gentoo forums are being upgraded so that we can use the latest in modern blooming technologies. As many of you are no doubt aware, phpBB has been a daunting maintenance burden and despite years of effort, migrating to phpBB 3 has stalled forever. It’s time to admit it and find another solution. Fortunately, there is precedent from other FOSS communities that have faced a similar problem.

tl;dr, we chose Discourse as the new forum software.

It seems doubtful that we will be able to import any of the old posts, and will likely start completely clean. However, we have been working on implementing AI features used via the Discourse API, which will scrape the internet for our old forum content (and more!) and put it into our new home for us. As a result, viewing new posts will also include old posts for the next few years or so, depending on how many of the old forums are backed up via the Internet Archive and similar archive sites. We have pretty high hopes that many threads will appear exactly as they used to (after all, AI can only regurgitate what already existed…).

We understand that this move will be controversial, and have been working on some light theme skins that will make it look a bit more like the classic phpbb2 of old, which will hopefully help alleviate most concerns.