Forum Software Reviews

As we reported it on a previous news, Facebook is planning to remove the Discussion Boards app from all Facebook pages on October 31th, including all previous discussions, topics and messages. Fortunately, a small Irish company, Pixode Ltd, has released a new application, called Forum for pages for Facebook, providing a basic forum software for this social network AND allowing you to migrate your data from the old Discussion Board app to this one.

If you want to see it right now, our Facebook page was migrated to this new application.

Here is how to backup and keep a forum on your own Facebook page:

1. First, go to the Facebook website, and open the Forum for pages application homepage.
2. Once there, click on the button Add Forum to your page.
   
   Forum for pages Facebook Application
3. As usual, you will have to confirm your choice by clicking on Add Forum to your page.
   
   Add Forum for pages Confirmation
4. Now that the Forum for pages application is installed, you can already create new topics, and play around with it. In order to migrate your previous discussions from the Discussion Boards app, there is a specific button Import existing discussions on which you are, obviously, eager to click.
   
   Import Existing Discussions
5. After waiting some seconds (could be several minutes, depending on the size and the activity of your forum), the Forum for pages application will be filled with the previous discussions. This is it, your content is safe now!
   
   Newly Imported Topics
6. As any existing topic, you can navigate through them and comment them, as before. Forum for pages is of course a bit basic, but, still, is a more rich forum software when you compare it with the ongoing removed Bulletin Board application.
   
   A Topic in Forum for pages

Note that the P&O Cruises Australia company was able to save more than 4000 discussions using this solution, so it looks very stable and functional. By the way, do not wait too long, because this trick will not work anymore after the 1st of November 2011, where this old Bulletin Boards application will be removed!

If you want to review this application before migration, go to our Facebook page.