The SparkFun Community Forums are now hosted on the Discourse platform (https://discourse.org), greatly enhancing the user experience for our forum users, and enabling long-desired functionality to our forums. Additionally, Discourse allows us to rapidly enable new features on the forum and address technical needs quickly.
Discourse is an industry leading community platform that provides all the tools expected from a modern forum, and allows us to deliver long requested functionality, while maintaining the spirit and collaboration of today’s SparkFun community.
Getting Started
All user accounts were migrated to the new forums, but user passwords were not for security reasons. To login, you need to reset your account password during the login process by selecting the “I forgot my password” link on the login dialog.
Forum Categories and Topics
All the posts and categories from the old SparkFun forums were migrated to the new Discourse site. As part of the process, some housekeeping and organization updates were made to simplify the forum navigation, archive old categories and fit into the structure of Discourse. In particular
- The category structure was modified to present a simplified, easier to navigate organizational structure. As part of this effort, some categories were added and some sub-categories collapsed into a single category.
- Older and obsolete categories were placed under the “Archive” category.
- Some edge case categories were deleted (shipping times from 2016 aren’t really relevant in 2024!), but this was minimal
Old Forums
The old forums site is available until mid-August for reference if needed, but SparkFun support will not be interacting on that site. This site is available at https://old-forum.sparkfun.com.
What’s Next
Like you, the SparkFun team is learning how to operate and use the Discourse platform. As we do, we’ll make changes that make sense for the community. For now, our first priority is supporting the transition to the new platform and rapidly addressing any issues as they arise.
Have Issues or Questions?
If you have any issues or questions, please respond to this post. And if you have login/transition issues, send a message to our support team at support@sparkfun.com.
We’ve been enjoying using Discourse and think you will too!
SparkFun