The biohack.me forums were originally run on Vanilla and ran from January 2011 to July 2024. They are preserved here as a read-only archive. If you had an account on the forums and are in the archive and wish to have either your posts anonymized or removed entirely, email us and let us know.

While we are no longer running Vanilla, Patreon badges are still being awarded, and shoutout forum posts are being created, because this is done directly in the database via an automated task.

2023-2024 Biohack.me Changes - Your Review Needed

At Grindfest 2023, we discussed how the Biohack.me forum, Slack and Grinder wiki could be better. We need input from the rest of the community. We want to hear from you if there are better options or things we aren't thinking of.

Forum Change - Switch to Discourse
We propose changing from the Vanilla forums https://open.vanillaforums.com/ to the Discourse forums https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Cons of Vanilla
1. It has broken a couple times now, at least once due to changes they made
2.They are reducing support for open source
3. Search isn't great
4. Doesn't do well on mobile devices

Work involved
1. Setting up infrastructure and security
2. Migration of database/data from Vanilla
3. Testing migration

Are there any objections to switching to Discourse? Do we have anyone with skills to help?

Chat App Change - Switch to Discord
There are several chat tools out there and various instances of "biohacker" Slacks and discords. This would be branded biohack.me and not be business owned. We propose changing from Slack to Discord

Cons of Slack
1. It doesn't keep messages so history is lost
2. It's expensive to move to a pro plan

Work involved
1. Setting up Discord securely
2. Migrating users from Slack and shutting it down

Are there any objections to switching to Discord? Do we have anyone with skills to help?

Wiki Change - Fix wiki
This is a main project for me this summer.
1. Discourse has a wiki butit isn't great
2. Mediawiki needs to be re-installed with better security from the start.
Do we have anyone with skills to help?

Those three are big changes and we want to make everyone's voice is heard. These are long due changes and we're excited at the idea of improving the infrastructure.