“The Lists” Are Moving!

You’re probably aware that, for more than 20 years, OSR has supported and maintained a set of peer-support lists.  During that time, NTDEV, NTFSD, and WINDBG have become the definitive places among Windows system software developers to ask questions and get answers.

We are proud to announce that in the coming weeks, we’ll be moving NTDEV, NTFSD, and WINDBG to a new home.  We’ll have more details about the migration in coming weeks, but there are a few things we can already share.

• We will (attempt to) migrate all the user accounts from the lists to the new community.
• Your password(s) will not follow you through this migration.  Thus, you will need to set your password for the community via a one-time process.
• Users who currently interact with the lists via email will be able to continue to use that mode to interact with the lists.  We do not promise to maintain the exact same email address for the lists that we currently use.  For a variety of reasons, this may just be more difficult than its worth.  Stay tuned.
• Users who currently interact with the lists via the forum interface, will be able to continue to use that method.
• We will not support interacting with the lists via NNTP.  Sorry… it’s just too… old and broken.  We understand this will disappoint some users (including some within OSR), but we feel this is the best decision going forward.
• The new community interface will support all the “modern conveniences” people have come to expect from online communities:  You’ll be able to edit your posts (for a limited period of time), post using Markdown (including code blocks with highlighting), and post screen shots.  You’ll be able “subscribe” to various topics and receive notifications of updates to those topics.  You can… gad… even have an “avatar” that appears with your posts.

• We will migrate all posts from 2010 and later to the new community.  This choice was entirely arbitrary.
• We will keep the old NTDEV, NTFSD, and WINDBG lists online in their current locations in a read-only state “for a while” — We have no firm plans about how we’re going to handle this or how long we’ll keep the old site.  We will put very clear redirects from the old site to the new community.  And, to be clear, it is our firm desire to retire the existing osronline entirely. We’ll see…
• We promise to resist the temptation too enable too many “cute” features on the new site.  This new community has the ability to do everything (a) that you could ever want to do and (b) that you hate about online communities.  It has the potential to be connected to social media.  It has the potential for gamification.  It has badges, voting, leader boards, keyword clouds, hashtags, and a bunch of stuff that I don’t even understand. We’re leaving almost all of it off  at least initially.  If we, as a community, decide to enable some feature..  like voting on posts is a useful thing, for example… we can discuss as a community enabling that feature.
• We may experience some downtime during the move.  We have a *lot* of stupid shit to sort out, ranging from email addresses to subdomain MX records, spam scanning, and I don’t even know what else.  We’re going to work not to drop any posts during the process, but even as we do so we may not be up continuously.

We will have a lot more information about the new community available soon.  We expect the move to take place over the next few weeks… and in any case, we expect the move to be completed and stable by the end of June.

We’re looking forward to posting more specific information soon.  Please stay tuned for updates here at the OSR Dev Blog.