Its easy for us to think our forum posts are forever and even link to them from our personal blog sites. I’ve been stung by this before on another forum which suddenly closed down and all my posts I made there were lost forever.
So here is my question: when sitepoint forums moves to Discourse will our old posts (and any other post we have been helped by) be migrated over or should we thinking about vigorously copying them to our hard drive before the time runs out?
We do plan to migrate them and to associate them to your migrated account on Discourse, however, things are not always 100% so there is a potential chance some may not transfer over smoothly.
However, keep this in mind, over at Discourse, they are still working on a feature that lets you download your posts, PMs, etc. from your account profile page (thus giving you a bit more control than what exists within vBulletin).
Also, we plan to keep this site up in a archive mode only for a while (maybe more) so it definitely won’t be lost.
No, you won’t lose your posts. Some will be migrated and the rest will be archived. None will be deleted.
What about our pms?
Good question.
I guess it would be a good idea to download them as XML / CSV / Text
Yes, you will quite possibly lose those.