What happened to the CentOS Forums

Where did CentOS Forums Go

• What Happened
• Lessons (Re)-Learned.

What Happened

If you try to go to the CentOS Forums, you will instead be directed to the status page. The CentOS Forums is sadly one of the resources that went away the the end of CentOS Linux 7. The system was a classic PHP web-forum which had been run for over a decade by volunteers as a resource for the CentOS Community. Due to its age, and its usefulness, there have been several requests to get it back up and working. However, it looks highly unlikely for several reasons:

1. The service was not actually ‘owned’ by the CentOS Project. It was set up and run by various volunteers who were associated with the project but was never a ‘core’ part of the project. So when Red Hat ‘bought’ CentOS in 2014, this service was not part of that merger.
2. The volunteers who were running the service mostly left after CentOS Linux 8 was end of lifed earlier than thought on 2021-12-31. Many in the community had thought the operating system would have a 10 year lifetime like earlier releases, but Red Hat decided in 2021 to focus only on the CentOS Stream versions.
3. The remaining volunteer announced that they would only support the system until the end of CentOS Linux 7 in 2024. Announcements were put on the forums that the service would be going away.
4. The contents of the forums could not be transferred to the CentOS project (aka Red Hat) because the contents were never licensed under a license which would allow for it. Basically any post on the forums was under the copyright of the poster and possibly licensed to be viewed on that forum only. Moving the posts and documents on the forum would have required getting the permission of every individual poster where many of them may no longer be contactable.
5. Various parts of the database are also covered by the GDPR, ‘Right to Forget’ and similar laws around the world. Because again the licensing of the forum was fairly informal, it was thought that transfers would need further legal review.
6. Even putting the service in a ‘read-only’ format would have required continual maintenance for a PHP code base which would have needed porting to a newer operating system and toolkit. [Doing dumps and rewrites for forums tends to end up with unreadable messes unless a lot of extra time and effort is done.]

Since the remaining volunteer had done this for 4 years and didn’t want to continue, it was decided to shut off the forums when CentOS Linux 7 went away. For people who still wanted to discuss issues with CentOS Stream, the Fedora Project added a section to its discourse server: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/neighbors/centos/71 which has seen some traffic (mostly people asking for howtos).

Lessons (Re)-Learned.

The first lesson I have re-learned from this EOL is that the Internet is ephemeral but operating system needs are forever. I have a very large list of bookmarks in my browser which are no longer useful but on checking, I realized that nearly every bookmark over 5 years was also no longer where it was ‘originally’ pointing to. In some places, some system administrator has made a redirect (which probably leads to another redirect and another).. but in many cases the posts are gone like so many tears in the rain.

The second lesson I have re-learned is that copyright licenses are much more important than we give them credence. When setting up a forum or other group, make sure that you ensure that others can reuse what is posted and the authors understand the permissions they are granting others before they post.

The third lesson is when-ever possible make a local copy of things you find important. If it is under some sort of copyleft, make a direct copy and keep it in markdown or some similar format for later updates. If it isn’t permissible, then rewrite it as best you can to make sure that you know how restore backups on a CentOS Linux 5 system even though the OS is now end-of-lifed for over 7 years.