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+[[!meta title="Colophon"]]
+
+## Ikiwiki
+
+The EmacsConf site is actually a wiki, editable by anyone on the
+planet.  The pages are written in markdown, and converted to HTML
+using the [ikiwiki](//ikiwiki.info) wiki compiler.
+
+You are welcome and encouraged to help improve the site.  Please see
+the [instructions on how to edit the wiki|editing].
+
+## Oddmuse
+
+The EmacsConf site during 2019 was built on the awesome
+[Oddmuse](//oddmuse.org) wiki software, available under GPLv3+.
+
+It used a number of [extensions](//oddmuse.org/wiki/Module) to add
+additional useful features.  Most notably, we used the
+[Namespaces](//oddmuse.org/wiki/Namespaces_Extension) module to allow
+creation of what are in effect sub-wikis for each conference year.
+
+As nice as Oddmuse is, we found the lack of proper nested pages rather
+limiting for our use-case, and have since switched to using ikiwiki
+for this wiki.
+
+## Discourse
+
+For EmacsConf 2015 we started self-hosting a Discourse instance at
+[discourse.emacsconf.org](//discourse.emacsconf.org).  But as years
+went by, it became something of a maintenance burden, as the current
+organizers were interested in maintaining production Ruby software,
+and the previous volunteers having moved on to other adventures in
+life.  Also, the VPS that hosted our Discourse instance and was kept
+running all of these years could potentially go offline at any time.
+
+For EmacsConf 2019 onward, as an effort to simplify our infrastructure
+and minimize the number systems we have to manage (so we could better
+focus on the main pieces of software needed for running a conference
+using only free software), I decided to retire our Discourse instance.
+A traditional mailing list plus our IRC channel have since taken
+Discourse's place as the means of communication for EmacsConf
+organizers, volunteers, and participants; covering most if not all the
+use-cases we had for the forum.
+
+- Mailing list: [emacsconf-discuss](//lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacsconf-discuss) on gnu.org
+- IRC channel: `#emacsconf` on `irc.freenode.net`
+
+To preserve old Discourse discussions, I created a read-only archive
+of the forums using [HTTrack](//www.httrack.com) like so:
+
+```
+httrack http://discourse.emacsconf.org -O discourse.emacsconf.org \
+        -x -o -M10000000 -N100 -I0 --user-agent "Googlebot"
+grep -rl index-2 discourse.emacsconf.org | xargs sed -i 's/index-2/index/g'
+mv discourse.emacsconf.org/index{-2,}.html
+```
+
+The read-only archive of the old Discourse forum is accessible at the
+old address, [discourse.emacsconf.org](//discourse.emacsconf.org).