Two platforms, one goal

The Q&A platform gutefrage was founded by Holtzbrinck eLAB in 2006 and is one of the websites with the widest reach in the DACH region. With almost two million registered users and monthly visitor numbers of over 30 million unique users, gutefrage has been one of the Internet giants in Germany for years. Under the slogan “gutefrage - because someone always knows”, users are encouraged to ask their personal questions to the incredibly diverse gutefrage community and thus get swarm knowledge and experience.

In October, the platform “gutefrage” went into high gear taking over Europe’s largest car and motor community, MOTOR-TALK. The platform was founded in 2001, and with over 65 million posts, is Europe’s largest online car community. Automotive fans can exchange ideas with like-minded people in over 700 forums and 15,000 blogs. User-generated reviews of vehicle models can be read in more than 25,000 car tests. In 2015, mobile.de took over the platform as the sole shareholder. In July 2023, mobile.de announced that it would discontinue the service at the end of the year. This is where gutefrage.net entered the picture. The Munich-based company announced on October 5 that it would take over MOTOR-TALK and continue to operate it largely unchanged.

The Q&A platform gutefrage was founded by Holtzbrinck eLAB in 2006 and is one of the websites with the widest reach in the DACH region. With almost two million registered users and monthly visitor numbers of over 30 million unique users, gutefrage has been one of the Internet giants in Germany for years. Under the slogan “gutefrage - because someone always knows”, users are encouraged to ask their personal questions to the incredibly diverse gutefrage community and thus get swarm knowledge and experience. The two platforms harmonize well, thus creating synergy. “Our goal at gutefrage is to always bring people with common interests together and thereby open up new perspectives. MOTOR-TALK brings together numerous car enthusiasts with corresponding expertise in a very active community, which is a perfect fit,” says Philipp Graf Montgelas, CEO of gutefrage.net GmbH.

Rescued at the last minute

A turbulent year ended on a positive note for MOTOR-TALK: at the last minute, they found a buyer, gutefrage.net, who wants to continue operating the platform. And a reliable partner, PCG, who has actively helped to lift the outdated site into the AWS cloud in an incredible two months.

2023 was an emotional rollercoaster for MOTOR-TALK and its users. The management of mobile.de, owner of MOTOR-TALK since 2015, announced that it would be discontinuing the community platform at the end of the year. With its user-generated content, the forum never really suited the company. But the main reason was that the data center that hosted the platform was to be shut down. A migration was out of the question for mobile.de and MOTOR-TALK’s days seemed to be numbered.

But there was a happy ending after all. At the last minute - in October 2023 - gutefrage took over the website. In terms of content, it was a good fit: “We know our way around community platforms,” says Peter Fröhlich, CTO at gutefrage. The company also has its own marketer for online advertising in the form of its subsidiary highfivve, and therefore has no external marketing costs.

The clock was ticking: the data center was scheduled to be shut down on 31 December 2023 - and it was. Migrating to another data center in two and a half months seemed impossible at the time, not least because MOTOR-TALK was running on a proprietary IT system from mobile.de, which was more than 15 years old. And to make matters even more complicated: MOTOR-TALK could not move to gutefrage’s hosting center because there wouldn’t be enough space or resources on such short notice.

The only way out: migration to the cloud. But where to and with whom? gutefrage’s management had a decisive flash of inspiration. Word had gotten around that PCG had been contracted to do maintenance on MOTOR-TALK since 2022. “We got in touch and quickly realized that PCG was very familiar with it and also knew the ‘backstairs’ in the old system,” says Peter Fröhlich. The decision was made within days. Together with PCG, the gutefrage team wanted to bring the entire MOTOR-TALK offering into the AWS cloud.

First, a migration plan was created. This proved surprisingly successful, says Fröhlich. “A lot of things went as planned, some didn’t. But we took each day as it came.” It quickly became clear that both gutefrage and PCG teams had the same agile working style. “The chemistry was right from the start,” says Fröhlich, who is a computer scientist himself and helped design the new platform architecture for the project. “We worked hard together, and the PCG colleagues worked independently towards the goal - I’ve had different experiences with other IT service providers.”

Apparently with great success. After a maintenance window filled with hectic work, the migration was completed on December 12. Apart from minor outages lasting a few minutes, everything went smoothly and according to plan.

The migration was no simple lift and shift: “Because the basic platform changed, many parts of the application were previously in proprietary systems or were simply massively outdated, we had to rebuild everything from the source code and modernize some of it in the process. This alone took over a month,” explains Olivia Ratajzak, technical project manager at PCG.

Another challenge: the site has numerous interfaces to other applications - from the GDPR-compliant member registration process to sending emails, Google Analytics and displaying advertising. Three PCG developers were tasked with adapting these interfaces. “Not everything could be defined in the migration plan, we worked flexibly, but we all knew the common goal,” says Ratajzak. “It’s important not to be afraid of failing on such a suicide mission. If it doesn’t work immediately, it will be fixed later.”

The community also played its part. Users had to agree to their personal data being transferred to gutefrage - which most of them did. Many were probably still in shock. After all, three months earlier it was said that MOTOR-TALK would be shut down, which led to fierce protests. Users benefited immediately: the site has become noticeably faster. The team also used the migration to incorporate some long-lost features, such as a dark mode in the apps.

However, the motor community is not a sure-fire success. “This is initially an investment,” says Fröhlich, but one that is designed for the long term. And so, for the CTO, last year’s migration is just the start for the further development of the platform. In the coming months, the site will be completely overhauled and brought up to date with the latest technology, as is already the case with the other communities in the gutefrage universe. Fröhlich: “We will also be drawing on PCG’s expertise for this.”

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