Why did you change the site/software from the old site?

There are actually a couple of reasons.

First and foremost was the speed/system load/efficiency of the old software.

Add to that the fact that the new Drupal software had a wider range of features that would be useful on debianHELP, and that sealed it.

Of course, the idea of playing with a new toy never entered into the decision -- I swear.

Note that most of the old forum posts and articles were not moved over with the software switch; there are two reasons for this. The first is sheer laziness. Converting the data between sites could've been done, but it would not have been smooth and would have meant doing some kludges. I don't like kludges.

But more important was a licensing issue. About six years ago a decision was made to have posts to debianHELP made under the GNU Free Documentation License. Some people took great offense at that, especially when Debian's legal group declared the license to be non-free. (Note: This site is not an official part of Debian.)

With the site change a decision was made to have all content licensed under the Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Thus, the license for the old content cannot be changed by anyone except the person who created it. Sure, I could've closed my eyes and just converted it and probably no one would have cared; but that's shady.

So those two factors -- laziness and the license -- equalled leaving the old content where it was. We link to the old web site in an archived state so the content can be searched. And if you have content in the old site that you created that you think will help others, please feel free to copy it to this new site. Since you're the copyright holder, you can do that.