<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">The decision to move to a forum was announced a while ago, and it hasn’t appeared yet. I think we will be making the move soon and I wanted to provide some reasons why it was delayed and what comes next.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The reasons it was delayed are twofold:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">- When we (the community) decided to move to a forum there was plenty of other planned infrastructure work that was in the works that took immediate priority (such as the source compatibility suite and supporting Swift 4 development).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">- In August (when Swift 4 was wrapping up) my team at Apple seriously picked up the topic of the forum again and started looking in how to make it happen. At that point, a bunch of unexpected delays, one after the other, happened. I can’t share these details (they are mostly non-technical) and going through them would come off as me making a bunch of excuses anyway. I do realize the forum has been promised and not yet delivered for some time, and I know how frustrating that is to the community.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Here’s what happens next:</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">- We plan on having the company behind <a href="http://Discourse.org" class="">Discourse.org</a> host the forums. We’re wrapping up the remaining steps to issue a PO, but my hope is to get that all done within the next couple weeks. Thanksgiving in the USA may delay that to the beginning of December.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">- My understanding is the forum will still have a <a href="http://swift.org" class="">swift.org</a> address, so the hosting is just an implementation detail.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">- The company hosting <a href="http://Discourse.org" class="">Discourse.org</a> will migrate the existing mailing list archives over to the new forum. One thing we will need to figure out (possibly as a community?) are specific requirements we have in place for that migration. The new forums don’t have to exactly mirror how the mailing lists are structured today, and part of the reason to move to the forum was motivated by having new opportunities to structure conversations.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I suspect there will be some trial and error with moving over the existing mailing lists to the new forum, and I don’t have a good feel on how long that will take. However, once we reach that stage, it should be very transparent to the community what exactly is going on. My hope is that process will start in December.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Ted</div></body></html>