But if the pod is being closed next week, we don’t have a lot of days anymore to spread it, and especially we don’t have time in between these days to fix stuff.
That doesn’t help the people if they are forced to use it (or the alternative would just be to not use it, create a new account, migrate contacts manually, close the old account and loose all old posts). If the old server is running anyway and they would still be allowed to use it a few more months, then they would actually have a choice to either volunteer as beta testers now (maybe the people who already created a new account and want to migrate now), and help finding bugs and stabilize the feature, or if they want to wait a bit longer until some bugs were fixed and then act as second round of beta-testers, or wait until maybe even more things are fixed. That way it would be spread over weeks/months, and we have actually a chance to fix stuff between imports and also users have a choice with what level of stability/beta-testing they want to use it.
For most parts of the data it works well, but there are probably still a few edge cases, and also situations where migrations happen in parallel aren’t tested a lot yet, and photos aren’t handled really at all on other pods. (see Backup and restore – account migration)
I can already tell you, I’ll not have time on that day, and as said, I’m completely booked for the next 3-4 weeks (maybe a few hours here and there, but not a lot and no guarantees).
Of course you can do it without me, but even then, there isn’t much time left and still a lot of open questions, possible bugs to check and other things to do. And I feel that it’s probably ready enough to do some testing with some accounts, but I don’t feel well importing/migrating 1000 accounts in a few days without the possibility to fix stuff in between it. I know it won’t break their new accounts irreparable, so that’s at least something, but it probably will cause inconsistencies (which are hard to find and stay for a long time or forever and that can and probably will cause bugreports in the future for weird stuff happening. Having more time to focus on a few beta-tester migrations and check if everything worked there and then fix stuff would probably help a lot with that (especially since you have access to both framasphere and diaspora-fr and can check logs/database stuff). But if 1000 users are migrated you can’t focus on anything.
That’s why I’m suggesting if the server keeps running for a while anyway, still allow the users to access the frontend instead of blocking them out. That would give the users a choice if they want to migrate now, or in 2 weeks, or in 1 or 2 months, and it will give use time to focus on single edge-cases and check what has gone wrong, and fix it and then test let more users test it. That will not end up in a better result for a lot of the still existing active users on framasphere, it will also end up in a better and more polished migration/import feature in the future. When we can focus on single beta-tester-imports, we can check what has gone wrong, fix it, and then have more users testing the fix again. If you force all users to migrate in a few days, probably a lot of the problems will be overlooked (if the import doesn’t fail, but still something went wrong), and even for the things you’ll find, you then don’t have another round of users to then test the fix again. So having time to focus will end up in a more stable import/migration feature in general.
I wouldn’t ask that if you would say you need to shut the server down at the deadline-date anyway to save resources/cost or something … but if the server literally stays running for a few more weeks/month, it just looks like a sane thing to do to still allow active users to use it while you close/cleanup inactive users in the background and while we stabilize the migration feature. It will be a better situation for us to have time to focus on fixes, it will be a better situation for the active users who maybe still want to wait for some more fixes and then migrate in a few weeks, and it will even be a better situation for future migrations unrelated to framasphere if we are able to build a more stable migration.
Sure, the final shutdown will happen eventually, but we can make everything a much smother migration if we spread if out over a few weeks/months and not only a few days. And I don’t see what speaks against it if the server is still running anyway. If support is your only concern, I’m sure we can find a solution for that (like you already have the warning box, just keep that up-to-date explaining the current information so still active users see what the plan is, whom to contact (you, or us in general in case of issues with the migration). Situations like this need good communication anyway, and I think with that we can minimize the support by framasoft to an acceptable minimum (people who don’t read the current situation in the warning box an still contact them probably would also contact them if the pod is completely down, there is probably not much we can do to guarantee zero support requests).
If you’ll close all accounts on framasphere then their old account will be closed too, so they can import it again later on their new pod, but their old posts will be gone on other pods. Also, they would then would need to migrate their contacts manually to a new pod if they don’t want to use the beta-migration yet. So again, being allowed to continue using the framasphere as long as the server is running anyway (and then migrate a few weeks later when they feel confident of using the stabilized import) would be a better option for the user.