Supercharging our forums with AI
Apr 1, 2026

This turned out to be an April Fool’s post. For the real upgrade announcement see here.

The Gentoo Forums are being upgraded for us to be able to leverage the latest in modern bleeding edge technologies. As many of you are no doubt aware, phpBB has been a challenging maintenance burden and despite years of effort, migrating to phpBB 3 has been eternally stuck. It is time to acknowledge this and find another solution. Fortunately, there is precedent from other FOSS communities that faced a similar problem.

tl;dr, we have chosen Discourse as the new forum software.

It seems doubtful that we will be able to import any of the old posts, and will likely start completely clean. However, we have been working on implementing AI features utilised via the Discourse API, which will scrape the internet for our old forums content (and more!), and post them for us in our new home. Due to this, viewing new posts will include old posts as well for the next few years or so, depending on how much of the old forums are backed up via the Internet Archive and similar archival sites. We have reasonably high hopes that many threads will appear exactly as they used to (after all, AI can only regurgitate what already existed…).

We understand that this move will be controversial, and have been working on some light themeing skins that will make it look a bit more like the classic phpbb2 of old, which hopefully should help alleviate most concern.