Help Typedrawers find a new home

James Hultquist-Todd
James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 433
in TypeDrawers Announcements
Outages, increases in hosting fees, and random CSS changes abound. I think it's time to start looking at other options for forum hosting. If you are knowledgeable about such things I could use your help!
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Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,592
    I mentioned this to our web developer, and he recommends Discourse as a platform for this kind of forum. Neither he nor I have experience porting existing content to a new platform, though.
  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 286
    I’m not up to date on forum software, but if self hosting is an option (can a hosted vanilla instance be migrated to a self hosted one?), there’s a host in germany called hetzner which is subsidized by the government and has very good pricing on powerful dedicated servers as a result. because enterprise customers require brand new hard drives, when they leave hetzner, those servers get wiped and auctioned starting around €30 a month with terabytes of storage and effectively unlimited traffic (it’s not really an auction, I’m not sure why they call it that). throw it behind cloudflare and then you get a CDN with snappy speeds around the world for free (and SSL pass through - no certificate management - too)
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 388
    It seems the open source Vanilla version was discontinued, so moving to a new host would also mean migrating the forum to a new software platform. That sounds like some heavy lifting ;)

    Hetzner is great, I've been hosting my stuff with them for nearly 20 years. (I don't think they are subsidized by the government though)
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 77
    Maybe MyBB? Merge System includes Vanilla.
    MyBB offers a merge system for easy merging of multiple forums from various different popular forum software, allowing an easy conversion process to MyBB.

  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 286
    Jens Kutilek said:
    It seems the open source Vanilla version was discontinued, so moving to a new host would also mean migrating the forum to a new software platform. That sounds like some heavy lifting ;)

    Hetzner is great, I've been hosting my stuff with them for nearly 20 years. (I don't think they are subsidized by the government though)a
    oh you're right, I mixed that part up with OVH - similar providers in many ways. just a simple border I got wrong :wink:
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,520
    edited October 2025
    I was about to post all what Georg just did, haha - the glyphsapp forum run on Discourse is great, and has a vanilla importer. James, keep us updated on what you need to make it happen :D
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 433
    Looks like Discourse might be the answer. I'll look into it.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,520
    Any updates a month on? :)
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 684
    Contact me if you need a heads up.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,110
    I’m all for a hosting change. I can’t access the forum through my home internet any more, for several months now.
  • adamwhite
    adamwhite Posts: 53
    How about just using a custom Discord server? Forums are quite outdated.
  • adamwhite
    adamwhite Posts: 53
    mitradranirban said:
    adamwhite said:
    How about just using a custom Discord server? Forums are quite outdated. 
    https://blog.discourse.org/2025/11/the-death-of-community-memory/ may be the reason not to do so
    Discord is not Slack, and secondly, when you have each topic as a subchanell, then what's the difference than the forum?
  • kmohl
    kmohl Posts: 1
    Another hosting provider worth considering: https://www.hosttech.ch/
    They are from Switzerland, but have servers in Germany (domain name .de), and Austria (domain name .at), fair prices, and a very good support.
  • Eris Alar
    Eris Alar Posts: 459
    Thomas Phinney said:
    I’m all for a hosting change. I can’t access the forum through my home internet any more, for several months now.
    Wow, is the network flagging it as malicious? I have no issues accessing it 
  • Eris Alar
    Eris Alar Posts: 459
    adamwhite said:
    How about just using a custom Discord server? Forums are quite outdated.
    Discord is much more like Slack than a traditional forum. As others have said discoverability is an issue. It also functions more like an almost realtime chat / stream of posts as opposed to a knowledge base and asynchronous message forum.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,110
    Eris Alar said:
    Thomas Phinney said:
    I’m all for a hosting change. I can’t access the forum through my home internet any more, for several months now.
    Wow, is the network flagging it as malicious? I have no issues accessing it 
    I had to get a VPN for other reasons, and that does the trick as a workaround. Which is better than only being able to access it from my phone (and only by turning off my wifi and using my cellular). Funny that this worked, seeing as my cellular provider is also my home internet provider, at the moment.

    But yes, basically it was some level of “protection” from my ISP.

    T
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 433
    Sorry everyone, I've been busy these last few months and have been neglecting things here. I think Discord might be the right answer for TypeDrawers as our yearly fees here have been growing to outrageous proportions.
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 433
    I meant Discord as I've never heard of Discourse but, after looking into it, it would be very expensive to use that for our needs.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 229
    I want to point a helpful feature of the present forum: the possibility to "Save Draft" your comment. As a member of the Fontlab forum, it's a facility I don't find there and it can be very frustrating !  
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,777
    I meant Discord as I've never heard of Discourse but, after looking into it, it would be very expensive to use that for our needs.

    Is the open source version of Discourse not viable? I guess it might mean a lot more work.
  • Matthew Smith
    Matthew Smith Posts: 103
    James Hultquist-Todd said:
    I meant Discord as I've never heard of Discourse but, after looking into it, it would be very expensive to use that for our needs.
    If you’re able to share what projected costs are for maintaining the site, I also think that’d be helpful. Would definitely be willing to become a regular contributor.
  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 286
    Discourse really goes out of their way not to prominently mention it’s open source software on their site, I guess because the revenue from their hosting business helps them maintain it, but it is free - https://github.com/discourse/discourse
    The catch is that you have to host it somewhere, but if Georg is able to host the Glyphs forum using Discourse on an inexpensive VPS, that sounds pretty effective - maybe you could either find a volunteer or solicit funds to hire someone on to set it up
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 388
    I made a test install of Discourse on a Hetzner VPS back in October. It went smoothly, but the hard part is migrating the data from the existing Vanilla forum, as the exporter plugin (porter-core) seems to have disappeared, and I'm not familiar with the admin side of Vanilla.

    Funny that this thread is getting some activity again right now, because just yesterday I deleted the VPS again because there apparently wasn't any interest anymore ;)
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 433
    Matthew Smith said:

    If you’re able to share what projected costs are for maintaining the site, I also think that’d be helpful. Would definitely be willing to become a regular contributor.
    The current costs are a little less than $1,000 USD a year just to keep the lights on.
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 433
    After thinking more about this, I think vanilla is the best place to keep TypeDrawers—we have such an accumulation of knowledge over the past ~13 years(?) here. 

    Maybe it's time to open it up to sponsorship*? I'd love to have enough to cover the basic costs, pay people to moderate, and hire someone who knows more about Vanilla to do some dev work.

    *I'd like the sponsors to be smaller businesses (not publicly traded and not tech companies).

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