Samsung Community is going dark for 3 days, and you might want to take preemptive action

If you’re a Samsung Galaxy user, there’s a good chance you’ve tried out the tech giant’s Community platform. Samsung Community, which is available as a standalone website, is also integrated into the Samsung Members app. It is an official forum that lets Samsung users connect, ask questions, share tips, and find news and announcements. It’s a useful resource, and that’s precisely why you might want to take note of an upcoming disruption.

The good news is that Samsung is giving the platform a “major overhaul.” The bad news is that the platform will soon be offline for 72 hours, and some of your data might not make it through the transition.

Samsung announced the development back in September, and now that the scheduled shutdown is just a few days away, we figured we’d give you a heads-up. Samsung Community will be down starting October 30 at 5 AM ET. The overhaul is expected to conclude on November 2 at 5 AM ET.

The company said taking the platform offline is necessary to ensure safe data migration and system deployment. Note that reading existing posts and comments will still be available on the web.

More importantly, Samsung is suggesting that users create backups if they wish to preserve certain information before the platform goes offline. That’s mainly because not everything will be migrated to the new version of Samsung Community. Data that won’t be migrated includes:

• Any unpublished posts saved in your drafts.
• Direct messages.
• Bookmarks.
• Post/Board subscriptions.
• Keyword/Label subscriptions.

Additionally, it looks like accounts at Beginner Levels 1 and 2 that haven’t logged in during the past six months won’t have any of their data ported over.

You can locally save important information, take screenshots, or request a download through the Download My Data menu on Samsung’s Account Privacy website.

What’s actually changing?

Although we don’t know whether the platform will look significantly different UI-wise, we do know about some functional changes Samsung is ready to introduce. For starters, you’ll finally be able to initiate and send a DM without inputting a subject line. This should make conversations on the platform feel more chat-like. Additionally, the option to report individual chat messages is going away. After the update, you’ll only be able to report entire conversations.

Samsung is also changing how accepted solutions work. In discussions, users will only be able to mark top-level comments as solutions. Nested comments and replies will not be eligible to be marked as solutions.

Lastly, Samsung is also introducing restrictions on deleting posts and comments. Once someone comments on a post that you’ve created, you’ll no longer be able to delete that post yourself. Similarly, if you comment on someone’s post and your comment gets a reply, you won’t be able to delete your original comment.

Beyond these changes, Samsung hasn’t revealed much about what else the overhaul will bring. Fortunately, we won’t have to wait much longer to find out what other improvements the platform has in store.