We are currently migrating Generic Mapping Tools web services from the University of Hawaii to infrastructure managed by the EarthScope Consortium.
As part of this effort, a prototype of this forum is now available as a Discourse-hosted site at ‘earthscope.discourse.group’
We invite you to explore the prototype and share your feedback in this thread. Please let us know whether the site performs as expected, or if you encounter anything that does not work as well as the current forum.
Please note that this prototype is intended for testing and evaluation purposes only. At a future point in the migration process, it will be replaced by an updated version of the official GMT Forum. Any messages posted on the prototype will not carry forward beyond this evaluation period.
The prototype Discourse hosted site has been taken down. We are working to set up a new discourse.group site and will announce it in this category when it is available.
The prototype Discourse hosted GMT Forum site is now at gmt.discourse.group.
https://forum.generic-mapping-tools.org/
So far the new Discourse hosted forum prototype is functioning as expected. I am thinking perhaps we can plan to move the service next week. During the process we would need to stop the posting of new messages to the forum, do a final backup of the service, transfer the service backup to the discourse.group site and have the discourse team restore the backup. I think that might take something like 2 or 3 hours that the site would be down.
Might Wednesday be a reasonable target date for the transition?
I was a little naively optimistic last month but now I’m ready. On Monday, we’ll be shifting the forum to the the Discourse hosted server. During the transition the Forum will be in read-only mode
I expect to start the transition on Monday 2026-06-01 around 17:00Z.
If everything matches my tests it should take about an hour, maybe less.
Does the forum migration include a DNS record update? If yes, how long the DNS update is expected to propagate? 1 min, 1 hour, 1 day?
I realized that it is not possible to add links using Markdown syntax anymore:
[PyGMT website](PyGMT)
In case this is related to the migration, would it be possible to support this again? This was quite convenient especially for the release announcement of PyGMT as we draft them externally at Hackmd before posting them here on the forum.
After a little digging, I found the issue is because of the update of the Discourse version that occurred when we transitioned. I have restored the old default behavior using the ‘Default composition mode’ toggle that is available in the admin site settings.
There is this description there that I found helpful:
Set the default mode for your community’s composer. Rich text mode provides a more modern, familiar writing experience for most users, while Markdown mode may be suitable for more technical audiences. Members can use a toggle in the composer toolbar to switch between modes.
The toggle button looks like ‘M+ A’ in the upper left corner of the composition window where you type or enter the text for your post (or reply). Once you toggle that for a post, it should remember your preference for subsequent posts.
Hi Solar,
Thanks a lot for looking at this.
The toggle button looks like ‘M+ A’ in the upper left corner of the composition window where you type or enter the text for your post (or reply). Once you toggle that for a post, it should remember your preference for subsequent posts.
This works perfect! And the preview window is also back 
.