An hour on Our, one last time

The Our Umbraco repository on GitHub is now archived.

Send-off

If you built anything with Umbraco in the last decade and a half, you probably still have the muscle memory to start typing “our” in your address bar to tap into the Umbraco community. Just moments ago, the Our Umbraco versions of the forum, packages, documentation, profiles, and karma officially reached their final conclusion. All of them moved on to somewhere better suited to the job.

Before I flipped the final switch, I wanted to write a proper send-off, because a redirect rule is quite a cold way to say goodbye to something this loved.

Where it came from

"Our" didn’t pop up out of nowhere. The Umbraco community started it’s life on a Yahoo Group, a mailing list where the earliest Umbracians shared questions, answers, and life updates by email. From there it graduated to YAF, Yet Another Forum, a bit of forum software that did the job but was never really ours.

This was before my time. I learned about Umbraco in 2009, just a few weeks before my first ever Codegarden. During the Codegarden keynote we learned about the official birth of Our Umbraco: one place to chat about Umbraco, find a package, read the docs and meet the people behind the profile pictures.

It launched just as the community was hitting its stride, and it became the thing every Umbraco developer bookmarked first. For me, "learning Umbraco" and "living on Our" became the same thing. I bet quite a few other community members recognise that feeling.

In 2012, I somehow managed to get hired by Umbraco HQ! Woohoo!

At the time, the first iteration of Our had not had a lot of love and that made me sad. During the retreat before Codegarden I managed to get it upgraded to the latest version of Umbraco (just remember that Umbraco 5 never existed so the latest version was 4.something at the time).

It started me down the path of becoming the sole maintainer of the codebase. As someone who “grew up” on the Our Umbraco forum, I was determined to keep it the best possible experience for everyone else in the community.

The documentation grew up alongside Our. In the early days it was a collaborative wiki, where anyone could edit it straight from the browser. Wonderfully open and hilariously chaotic once the spammers came in. More on spam later, but back to the wiki; it was becoming embarrassing.

Instead, in late 2012, we managed to launch a proper documentation section, backed by markdown files on GitHub. As far as I remember, the wiki lived on as read-only for a few years longer until it finally was retired.

Much later, with Umbraco 11 in December 2022, the modern docs left Our altogether for docs.umbraco.com, and only the legacy Umbraco 7 and 8 documentation stayed behind.

Memories

Some memories from over the years feature an infamous topic named “Umbraco 5- Performance issues” from early 2012, the long and painful reckoning that helped convince everyone, HQ included, that Umbraco 5 had to be put down. Surprisingly, that was the most active forum topic with 285 replies, wow!

I say surprisingly, because I was convinced that "tabgate" (if you know, you know) was the most discussed topic over the years, but the 2018 thread “only” got 218 replies in the end.

It was both Twitter (RIP) and the Our forum where we saw a lot of recurring characters appear. Some of us now happen to work at Umbraco: Dennis Aaen, Lee Kelleher, Matt Brailsford, Kenn Jacobsen and Nathan Woulfe, among others.

Other notable names from the forum were Alex Skrypnyk, Chriztian Steinmeier, Dirk de Grave, Douglas Robar, Jan Skovgaard, Marc Goodson and Warren Buckley. Apart from Doug, everyone is still very active in the community today (it’s not a cult). 

I have many more names I can easily add to this list, but I have to stop somewhere. No offense people!

We should talk about Karma

A lot of us were hunting for Karma, the "currency" on Our Umbraco for posting a great answer, creating a package, asking a good question, etc.

The title of this blog post is heavily inspired by Marc Goodson who wrote the definitive history of it in Karma Suit Ya!: the folklore of "Karmageddon", the legend of "the Karmanator", and his own quiet descent into treating the unanswered-questions list like a game of cricket he was playing against himself. It's still up on his own site, and it's one of the best things anyone has written about this community.

I'm still waiting for that part 2, Marc.

But how about the karma leaderboard? It doesn't get a new home. There's something fitting about that. Karma was never meant to be spent, transferred, or cashed in, so now it simply won't be. It retires with Our. At the very top of the final board sits Alex Skrypnyk on 24935, with Jan Skovgaard (23590) and Matt Brailsford (22415) just behind. A podium of people who spent an (unreasonable?) amount of their lives making sure yours went smoother.

The final board tells its own stories. Matt Brailsford's score is mostly packages: he built the things the rest of us installed. Jan Skovgaard posted over twelve thousand times, more than anyone; if Our had a front desk, Jan was sitting at it. Alex Skrypnyk and Dennis Aaen were not trailing far behind though.

Special shout-out to Dennis: I once claimed on Twitter that he was answering something like 85 percent of everything asked. Dennis still isn't sure that number was true, but nobody who was around then would bet against it. Everyone took different routes on Our, but all of them added up to the same thing: helping out a fellow Umbracian.

It turns out that I finished sixth on that final leaderboard, which tells you how much of my life this place took up, and that’s not even counting the actual maintenance of it.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The spam wars

Here's a less romantic piece of Our history that I've unfortunately always been on the forefront of: for years, I was the person the spam reports emailed. Somewhere in the config there's still my email address, where the site would forward me the worst of the internet.

Running an open community site meant a permanent, war against people selling kitchens, miracle cures, and every SEO scheme known to humanity. We built spam-word lists, scoring thresholds, a whole Slack channel of shame, and still they came. It was tedious and occasionally hilarious, and it was the invisible tax on keeping a place where real people could ask real questions without wading through junk.

Keeping the lights on

I've been the main maintainer of Our since 2012, but I was never alone in it. A lot of great people sent pull requests and fixes over the years. I must give a special shout-out to Anders Bjerner who made a big impact, helping us stay on top of the constant stream of incoming pull requests on the Umbraco CMS itself.

Over the years, I kept upgrading it all the way through the Umbraco 7 releases. Right to the very end it ran on the latest Umbraco 7, with the XLTS patches applied. The jump from 7 to anything newer was too daunting however: too many moving parts, too many integrations, too many years of accumulated technical dept.

That's the real reason this goodbye took so long. Rather than attempt one big upgrade, we've been (too) slowly, carving off pieces of Our into newer and better homes. Modern documentation moved to docs.umbraco.com and packages moved to the new Umbraco Marketplace, both back in December 2022. Releases recently got their own dedicated home at releases.umbraco.com. The big one was the forum, which moved to a Discourse instance in April 2025. After that, only a handful of things still needed somewhere to live, and as of today they finally have it.

Not every milestone went smoothly, either. Dennis Aaen still reminds me that he was the one on stage at Codegarden 2015, given the honour of pushing the button to launch a big site makeover live during the keynote. It didn't work. We spent the rest of that day quietly getting the site back online while everyone else enjoyed the talks. That’s how we rolled in those days.

Seb's job security

There's one loose end I should probably raise with HR. For over a decade, being the only person who really knew how to keep Our running was excellent job security. Now that it's been put to rest, that knowledge is now worth precisely nothing. So if this turns out to be the last thing I ever publish, you'll know how that conversation went.

What happens now

Nothing you cared about has been deleted. Most of it has moved to a better home:

• Documentation now lives at https://docs.umbraco.com

• The forum has moved to the new community forum

• Packages are on marketplace.umbraco.com

• Releases are at releases.umbraco.com

• The community (MVPs, meetups, contribution stories) lives at community.umbraco.com (you’re here, hello)

• Keep an eye out on the community roadmap for future plans

Every old link you have will redirect to the right place. Let us know if you’re missing something crucial.

Thank you

Being the person on the other end of the spam reports for all these years also meant I quietly got to watch an enormous amount of generosity pass through this site: people helping strangers at midnight, package authors giving away years of work for free, first-timers turning into MVPs. Our was the switchboard for all of it, and I had the strange privilege of a front-row seat.

When I let a few of the old forum regulars know that Our was finally being switched off, their replies said it all. "This is heartbreaking, missing that time," wrote Alex Skrypnyk, before sending a photo of his laptop open to Our beside a swimming pool, still poking around the site while on holiday.

So: thank you for every answer, every package, every accepted reply that turned green. Thank you for the karma you'll never spend and the karma you gave away.

H5YR, Our. You rocked.