Post #2547167

2026-04-04 13:23 UTC

@smallcircles@social.coop If you wanted to do that today, I suggest migrating to a platform with read-only mode. Usually it's for upgrades, but you could just leave it 'on' forever. I could see a static HTML export one day, but it's a bigger lift because there's no framework for presentation logic today. Then, of course, folks would have feelings about theming. 😅 If I did, I'd perhaps pair it with a scraping feature so it's not as irreversible & "orphaned" as a feature. Interesting idea!

Replies (1)

@smallcircles@social.coop 2026-04-05 05:47

@linc@phpc.social I have a #Discourse forum that runs on a subscription, graciously sponsored, and a couple other self-hosted Discourse forums running on VPS'es that incur costs. The HTML static export should be able to run on Codeberg Pages or GH Pages, or from anywhere that can run a basic website. Having the forum's information structure represented minimally in the HTML content structure is most important. The theming could be like https://csszengarden.com starting with a single default layout. Discourse has various ways to do an export, but they're all involved procedures. Over the years I noticed many forums that just disappeared, popping out of existence, their contents forever lost. Not sure how other forum softwares handle 'end of life' of a community. PS. #SX - a methodology focused on the intersection between #FOSS, #SocialWeb, and the #Commons - uses the notion of a Free software development lifecycle, and preps for end-of-life in final "Dispersal" stage. https://coding.social/blog/reimagine-social/#free-software-development-lifecycle

Open ##2547168