After being a depository for knowledge and discussions on the Unity game engine for over a decade Unity Forums are being shut down the end of July. In their stead the content will be merged with Unity Discussions and hopefully not too much information will be lost in the process.
Unity have announced details of the timeline of the upcoming closure (ironically enough on Unity Forums):
The transition will happen as follows.
- The new design and structure of Unity Discussions will be user-tested in a closed beta.
- The data will be migrated to Discussions. This is already in progress.
- We strive to minimize the period during which Forums and Discussions are unavailable to users. You will be notified in advance of the dates when each site will go read-only. Below is the high-level plan:
- Mid-July: The Unity forums will become read-only and remain in this state until they are shut down. During this time, you can continue to post your questions through Unity Discussions Q&A.
- Right before the Forums shut down at the end of July, Unity Discussions will become read-only for approximately two days to finalize the migration.
- Redirects for migrated forum content will be set up to ensure that old links to forum posts will continue to work without interruption.
Thankfully they are planning to migrate most of the important information as well as create redirects which will hopefully minimize the damage done to existing search results:
The Data migrated includes:
- Users:
- All valid user accounts that created at least 1 post or 1 like will be migrated.
- If a forum user already has an account in Unity Discussions, their account information and data will be added to their existing account.
- Avatars will be migrated unless the existing Discussions accounts already have an avatar selected.
- Post and like history will be migrated.
- Signatures will be appended to user bios in Unity Discussions, but they will no longer appear under user posts.
- Account settings will not be migrated.
- Topics (threads) and posts:
- All topics with at least 1 reply.
- All topics younger than 90 days, including topics without replies.
- All staff topics.
- All sticky threads.
- Topics and posts with at least 1 reply or 1 like, but no activity in more than 12 months will be migrated as “closed”.
- Current Forum thread and post URLs will be preserved as redirects to their new matching content.
- Embedded media will be migrated.
- Quotes, code blocks, inline codes, collapsable sections, and styling options supported by markdown will be migrated.
- BB code formatting for font type, font size, font color, and text alignment will not be migrated.
- Private messages:
- All private messages of migrated user accounts will be migrated.
- Attachments:
- All attachments that have file names will be migrated.
You can learn more about the closing of the Unity Forums and the migration to Unity Discussions in the video below.