This is the new site of the next iteration of Tech-artists.org.
Tech-artists.org has come a long way in since Rob Galanakis first put it online in almost a decade ago. The site has had hundreds of visitors every week, and it’s become the hub of an active, positive community. TAO has branched out into blog aggregation and our slack channel has become a daily hangout for tech artists from all over the world.
Unfortunately, we’ve also outgrown our infrastructure – which is an old PC sitting in Rob’s closet. We’ve also outgrown Rob’s bandwidth for taking care of the site, since he’s moved on to another career and doesn’t have the time to deal with every security patch, hack attack or power outage that hits the site. Most of all, the community is big enough that we should not rely on Rob’s generosity to supply the hardware and internet connection out of his own pocket.
So, we’re going to take the site to the next level. We’re going to move TAO to a new hosting setup with new forum software. We’ll be running on a cloud server, which should give us better uptime and more reliable bandwidth. We’ll be transitioning to using more modern forum software (prepare to say goodbye to all those “ignore can’t delete this” posts forever!).
#Here’s what’s going to happen:
##Transition Announcements
We’ll be adding a new Slack channel, #TAO2, with various threads for discussion about the new site and announcements.
old TAO Locked (starting March 29 2017)
We’ll be locking the legacy TAO site so we can prepare the migration. The site will still be available for read access but we’ll be preventing new signups and posts.
Rollout
We hope the new site will be up and running shortly after this… though, of course, its computers so… no promises. As part of the roll out we will be setting up a temporary URL a http://discourse.techart.online so that everyone can have a feel for what the new site will be like and make comments/suggestions in the slack channel. As soon as the new site is stable, the tech-artists.org url will redirect to the new site. All links to the old forums will be redirected to the new forums via a routing script, so there is no need to worry about updating your links or loss of search engine linkages.
Tipjar
A big thanks to Steve Theodore for covering the startup costs and the first six months of the new hosting, but down the road we’ll have to rely on donations from the community to keep the lights on. We’ve created a Tech-Artists.Org tip jar to take donations to keep the servers running. If you’ve been benefiting from the site, please consider donating something to help keep the community online. We’re still investigating methods for doing recurring donations (if you have any experience in this area drop a note in #TAO2 and let us know!)
Thank you ahead of time for your patience during the migration, we’ve completed a number of dry runs and we don’t expect any issues but none the less we will keep you all informed of the progress.
Cheers,
The TAO team.