The end of an era. I'm going to miss this site terribly.
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So, Chris, if I understand correctly, UbuntuMATE-specific questions are posted into the same "basket" along with all those applicable to other Flavours.
Did I grasp that correctly?
Is there any reason why there couldn't be a subcategory specific to UbuntuMATE, to help filter those items of particular interest to our migrated Community?
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Hi, @ericmarceau 
You've asked:
Disclaimer: I'm just a "normal" user ("Member" level) in "Ubuntu Discourse" / "Ubuntu Community Hub" - https://discourse.ubuntu.com
@guiverc has explained the history of the "Support and Help" section in "Ubuntu Discourse", that I believe gives some clues about why the "Support and Help" topics are confined to that particular area / category (by the way, when @guiverc mentions "Ubuntu Forums" he's specifically referring to the web site that used to exist at https://ubuntuforums.org/ ):
Having said that, there is an "ubuntu-mate" tag in "Ubuntu Discourse" and so, if one wishes to see the "Support and Help" topics that are about "Ubuntu MATE", we can filter by that "tag". Here's a direct link for topics that match those criteria:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/tags/c/support-and-help/306/ubuntu-mate
... and, conversely, the idea is that people that write new "Support and Help" topics that are about "Ubuntu MATE" should add that ubuntu-mate tag to their posts (besides other suitable tags).
The "About the Support and Help category" topic has more information:
I hope this helps
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I can't get any of the Discourse links to load. Maybe they are down for maintenance?
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Yes, Jim…there is a delay.
Update: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
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I'm getting 503 errors too...
I do see a MAJOR OUTAGE recorded at https://status.canonical.com/ but there is nothing more I can give sorry.
FYI: Thanks @ricmarques for your last post on this thread.
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Ubuntu Discourse available again!
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Ricardo has answered that perfectly already, but I'll add some background.
Some flavors wanted a support area for themselves (not Ubuntu-MATE either; they'd not said/requested to join yet, had only indicated they may move there in the future), but as many users of the site were using the site only to help others (ie. answer support questions like they did on Ubuntu Forums); splitting up support questions in many areas and not having them together, was seen as a major drawback. Some flavor support was likely to be ignored/missed, as most support help is not flavor specific.
Thus the tags that are used; they allow users to find flavor specific questions if that's all they're interested in, plus it allows those wanting to just help people to easily find all 'pleas for help' (ie. support questions) that they maybe able to answer. It actually means you'll likely get more 'eyes' on your posts/help-requests.
If I've explained that well enough; that is the reasoning for what has been done; it was a group decision seen to help the largest number of people.
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What does archive mean considering:
If no one can access, what good is an archive. All bookmarks lost.
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It means the server (sponsored by Bytemark) is closing. This runs ubuntu-mate.community and releases.ubuntu-mate.org. The other websites run off Cloudflare Pages (serverless, static), so the archive will be uploaded there and this domain will point to it.
The end result should look like a static version of this Discourse. I'll be making sure the URLs are not broken as best I can.
But yes, if you have "bookmarks" within the system, please download/export your data via Preferences. By "static", there are no moving parts: it won't be powered by a database any more.
By the way, if anyone's wondering: Bytemark are not the reason for the closure.
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Thank you again, Luke, for helping out the Community with this transition.
So ... if the site is moved, and frozen at the new location, any current bookmarks (URLs) will be defunct.
So ... can we export the bookmarks after the migration is completed, so that the bookmarks are valid and pointing to the new locations?
Also, I went to Preferences, and I don't see any mechanism to "export" bookmarks. Is there something I need to know on how to make that happen?
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The bookmarks came when downloading exported user data. But all links are the current links. So like you mentioned, it seems it would be better to download data after the migration.
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Hi
Does it mean that one will be able to search the history from the static site ?
e.g. searching for an issue/solution case already answered here ?
W
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So, if the download is ALL user-specific data, then I guess (hopefully), it is text-based and therefore can be passed thru a SED function to make a proper PATH substitution to the new system ROOT.
Luke (@lah7 ), would that be correct?
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You can think of this "static archive" as changing the system. Discourse (and its database) will no longer be running, they'll be no way to log in. Public data will be exported and processed to generate the "new site". In terms of what you see, it'll look like everything got striped back.
The intention is to preserve URLs, such as:
https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/ubuntu-mate-community-is-moving-to-ubuntu-discourse/31342
So, no, browser bookmarks will not be defunct. Links should still work from other sites and search engines.
This is referring to the bookmarks feature in Discourse, which will no longer be available:
There's no migration, it's more of a "one way" conversion. Please export your data before the end of the month if you wish to keep these.
To get to it:
- User avatar →
Person icon → 
Preferences - Scroll down in the Account tab. It's near the bottom: Export your data / Request archive.
Inside the ZIP are CSV files (and one preferences.json file) that you can open in a text editor, or as a spreadsheet, it's all plain text.
That's a good point. A static site could theoretically have its own search, but it might be too heavy with 31,342+ topics purely searched within a web browser (client-side), so it might not have one. You could use a search engine for this, usually with this syntax:
site:ubuntu-mate.community keywords (for example, with DuckDuckGo)
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I went to Ubuntu Discourse and their “cookie management” appeared to be accept all or go away.
If anyone can guide me on how to only enable “essential” cookies, I’ll give it another try. I object to “third party” cookies.
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This dialog?
Click the “Manage your tracker settings” button.
Scroll the window down, click the button.
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That is exactly what I got but I the switches to diable Performanceand Functionality could not be clickedto “off”.
I’ll try again later this afternoon.
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Unofficially speaking...
If you were part of the 
Ubuntu MATE Community, but didn't actually use 
Ubuntu, you might be interested to know LinuxCommunity.io opened a distro-agnostic MATE category. Many of our regulars have joined there too: