I'm sort of assuming that pages won't be edited all that often.

That is a reasonable assumption.

Inserting links in the page editor doesn't work right now. I'll need to find the right settings so the editor doesn't keep mangling urls.

Overall, the beta board is getting pretty functional now.

Some minor tweaks. Replaced the page editor with something that has a more comfortable license.

With pages now editable, I'm considering static pages largely taken care of as far as code goes.

Need to take care of the optional left sidebar, messaging admins, archiving threads, and enabling the random quotes before bumping to beta 0.4.

At that point it's just minor features and bug fixes to polish things up , but the board will be pretty much ready to go.

I've thought of an idea for migration without migrating user accounts. I could suck in the current threads and set all the users to a special legacy user. I can store the legacy time, legacy user name, and legacy tagline with the post and display those instead when a post is created by the legacy user.

Those posts would be a little different in that the user name wouldn't be a link and you couldn't block the user, but I don't think that would be that big a deal.

What's the issue with migrating user accounts?

There are a lot of user accounts, many that aren't active. In order to migrate users we'd need to store the old password hashes which aren't secure. Even if users are required to change the password immediately, all those inactive hashes will still be sitting around. The database will be much better protected, but we can't count on the database never being breached and those old passwords being cracked.

We can migrate the accounts and make everyone change their passwords without copying the old password hashes.

That's not much different than creating a new account. I suppose we could match on user name if the user wants and load that data.

I just think that this "legacy account" idea you're proposing would be too confusing, and that there should be more continuity between the two sites.

People really do come back to the site after a very long time, and we shouldn't make it harder for them.

The part that I get caught up on is how to authenticate a returning user without keeping the insecure hashes.

We could do name matching, but that would make it really easy to hijack an existing account. We could authenticate by using the profile e-mail, but that might be out of date and then the user is kinda stuck since they can't create a new account since there is an existing one.

I don't know. It's a tricky problem.