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Final shutdown and removal of Astaro.org

ruckus

Hi All,

The time has come to shutdown the https://astaro.org site.  With the migration of the forums and threads to the Sophos Community complete and the Astaro site in a static read-only mode I wanted to post and let you know what's happening next.

Having initially posted to the moderator's board (hidden to most) about the plan and to get feedback I don't see anything that blocks shutting down the site.  Therefore we plan to take the Astaro.org site offline on January 20th (one week from today as of writing) and redirect forum links on that site to the corresponding forum here.

I'd like to thank all members of the UTM group for their patience while waiting for the migration to complete - moving several hundred thousand posts was no small task. 

If you have any comments or questions please post below.



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  • I was going to write something here when first posted about removing astaro.org completely but decided against it. Not because I wasn't going to miss the old website... I already miss that website, so much easier to navigate, new posts in ALL the subforums on one page, thriving community, mods encouraging new users when they offer other users help, all posts answered within a few minutes, no spam, no need for mod approval to say thanks for your help, devs that actually interacted with the community, and a Community that was worth being called a Community.

    However after ranting for over a month about different things, it is clear that sophos modus operandi is to over promise and under deliver. Astaro.org was taken offline and nuked such severely that the formatting was lost on the read only site. On top of that, any embedded images were unavailable since you couldn't login. After moving the original content to the community site, those images have been lost forever. No big deal, things happen and we will move on. But the blatant disregard for the contributions of other people on those forums saddens me. Here is a post that I learned a few things from during copernicus beta (only a few months ago I might add)
    www.astaro.org/.../59001-technical-information-needed.html
    As you can see, it has disappeared into the ether. 404 on astaro.org and ofcourse never migrated to the community website. I knew about that post because I thought it had some interesting information... I wonder how many other posts have disappeared just like that one with nobody giving a rats *** about it.

    The bottom line is sophos is going to do what it will... its not a community, its a business. We can make all the noise that we want but I have been in IT long enough to realize when its time to let go and accept things for what they are
    .
    - Sophos didn't listen when XG was released, but promised a robust update schedule which turns out to be a release by the end of March. Wow, 4 months for v1.1
    -A botched update to UTM in both 9.3 and 9.5 forks and nobody is bothered about an urgent fix considering that the vulnerability has been discovered in webadmin by a third party and sophos already has a patch.
    -UTM with all its shortcomings is a dream compared to that disaster XG, yet UTM is being discontinued in favor of XG.

    If there was another software even remotely capable as the UTM, most of us old timers would have already moved on. Some already have and more will follow, I guess how long some of us last depends on how much more frustration will we have to deal with here.

    Regards
    Bill
  • in reply to Billybob

    400 plus views and 3 replies during a very slow beta... I didn't post in the thread but  has been a long time user it seems.

  • in reply to lferrara

    lferrara said:
    Another way to send away followers to move to another product. Astaro.org = UTM, Community = XG.

    It is happening right now, people are already discussing about it and asking for advice about replacing Sophos UTM with a different solution.

    Next best UTM product recommendations;
    https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/f/51/t/11141

    In my opinion, shutting down old astaro.org forum and releasing XG Firewall in the same week on November 2015 cannot be a coincidence.


    Back to the topic...this forum don't deserve even BETA status, it should be declared as ALPHA pre-release.

  • in reply to Billybob

    Billybob said:
    Here is a post that I learned a few things from during copernicus beta (only a few months ago I might add)
    www.astaro.org/.../59001-technical-information-needed.html
    As you can see, it has disappeared into the ether. 404 on astaro.org and ofcourse never migrated to the community website. I knew about that post because I thought it had some interesting information... I wonder how many other posts have disappeared just like that one with nobody giving a rats *** about it.

    I'm reading all the posts and will be taking them on board.  Just to jump in on the comment by  saying a post is lost.  I found it.

    - Old link: https://www.astaro.org/beta-versions/project-copernicus-public-beta/59001-technical-information-needed.html 

    - New link, same thread: https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/f/67/t/58086 

    What images are missing?  We tried to move as move as possible and placed attachments/images in one of two media gallery here...

    https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/m

    However there is a limitation on the number of attachments the migrated posts could have attached but we have the attachments/images - they aren't lost.

  • Ruckus, you could also change the top left logo, with something like this:

  • It's easy to feel how the astaro.org was a community and this community is a read only place where thoughts from lovers is not important at all!

    Luk

  • in reply to ruckus

    I am glad you found it but most of us are not as good as you are[:P]

    This is always the way I have searched astaro.org content using google search and I get these results

    Initially when I searched for that post a few days ago, I couldn't find it anywhere beside the astaro.org website. The original link as posted gives a 404 but the archive astaro.org? https://www.astaro.org/archive/t-59001.html  shows up in google results.

    About the missing images, I was referring to my post here https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/f/67/t/58158 which doesn't make any sense without the attached images. I am glad all the images are sitting together somewhere but without proper context they are useless but whatever.

  • in reply to Billybob

    Billybob said:
    About the missing images, I was referring to my post here https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/f/67/t/58158 which doesn't make any sense without the attached images. I am glad all the images are sitting together somewhere but without proper context they are useless but whatever.

    Thanks.  Fixed.  Yes, only one got transferred and the rest were in the media gallery.  And I apologize for not explaining how you would find them.  If you spot a post with missing attachments you can go copy the thread/post ID, go to the Astaro.org group media gallery, and search for the ID to locate all the missing ones.  Example:

    We do intend to fix the missing attachments for recent threads, but it's got a bit delayed.

  • I and Sophos do care about your comments and your suggestions. It takes time for us to implement changes and it is very evident that the Astaro forum and the Sophos Community are very different platforms. There are going to bumps along the way and new things to learn. Those bumps are being worked on but it won't be as quickly as everyone would like. We will need to design, implement, test and release - much like any other project is managed.

    Ruckus and I are championing your suggestions and working with a number of folks to get changes done to improve the experience. Search, UX/UI, ease of use, communication etc... are all on our to-do.

    We have another release of features coming up that we know will improve the experiences and we will continue to do so until our community members have a great experience. The plan to take the Astaro.org offline on Jan 20 will proceed and we will continue to improve this Community based on your feedback.

    If you need to contact me directly, feel free to PM me and we'll get on a call.
  • in reply to ruckus
    Yes, search works better in the Sophos Community than it did on astaro.org. Google is superior to both and does indeed find things in both sites.

    The problem is that one doesn't remember enough about the thread to be specific enough in the search criteria, so one often needs to glance at four, five or more suggested threads to find the one post that solves the problem. Community.sophos.com serves pages up so slowly that it's impractical to try to run through a half-dozen threads. Well, that and the often-discussed issues of the size of the typeface, the lack of navigation tools, etc.

    Cheers - Bob