As a regular Google Home user, I’m absolutely dreading June 30

It’s impossible to know everything about the tech that powers your life. I write about them for a living, yet I still seek out community forums, Reddit threads, and YouTube videos to learn more about my favorite gadgets. Smart home products can be particularly confusing. There’s a lot to keep track of, which is why I rely on sites like the Google Nest Community to make sure my Google Home setup stays up and running.

That is, at least for now. Years of crowdsourced knowledge will soon disappear as the old Nest Community forums are sunset in favor of the new Google Home and Nest Community. The replacement forum is better organized, but lacks the rich post history of the old forum that will be erased and shut down on June 30.

Although Google migrated some of its own posts to the new Home and Nest Community forums, user posts are being abandoned, and I don’t get why.

Google’s new community forums come at a cost

Google maintains a collection of community forums, each dedicated to one of its main product and service categories. They’re a valuable resource for anyone with a Google-related question. Anyone can sign up and post a question or suggestion, and they might get a reply from other users, community product experts, or Google employees. Chances are, if you have a question about a Google product or service, it has already been answered on one of the company’s forums.

While many forums are found under Google’s support domain, other legacy forums were not. Fitbit and Nest were prime examples, but Google is rectifying the problem by creating brand-new forums for each product line. That’s how we got here. The legacy Nest Community forums are about to be deleted as the Home and Nest Community forums become the new location for smart home help. The Home and Nest Community forums went live in mid-May, and the upgrades extend beyond a mere domain change or facelift.

The redesign is all about reducing spam and limiting off-topic conversations, according to Google. The company aims to do so with a new layout and organizational structure, including 10 specific product categories and greater emphasis on official Google blogs. Google is also teasing the possibility of Google Home app integration for forum content.

That all sounds great, but Google forgot one thing: the years-long history of posts and replies is the Nest Community’s best feature, and the refreshed Home and Nest Community discards it.

The Home and Nest community won’t grow back overnight

To the community’s credit, it’s already starting to rebuild the new Home and Nest Community forums back to their former glory. This won’t happen overnight, though. It’ll take a long time for the relaunched forums to grow to match the user base and knowledge of its predecessor. I’m worried that some information, such as questions and answers about older or discontinued Nest products, will never make their way to the new site.

When I have a problem with my Google Nest hardware or Home software, I rarely pull out product manuals or official support documents. Instead, I turn to the community. It’s something that most of us do — open Google Search, fire off a query, and immediately switch to the “Forums” tab. Community forums are so popular among Search users that Google places forum listings at the very top of the results page for certain queries.

Shortly after the new Home and Nest Community launched, I found myself researching how to change a setting on my Nest Wi-Fi Pro router. I followed the aforementioned steps to find a solution, but I noticed something else. More than half of the forum listings Google returned in response to my query were from the old Nest Community, and they’re set to be erased in just a few weeks.

There is about to be a serious knowledge gap regarding Home and Nest products on the web, and it’ll be of Google’s own volition.

Google didn’t migrate your data, but you can

Google opted to launch the new Home and Nest Community forums without carrying over user accounts, badges, posts, or replies. In an FAQ post, the company explains that the full reset is “to ensure the highest level of security and data privacy.” That’s commendable in theory, but I’m not sure the potential privacy or security risks outweigh the massive loss that will be the erasure of the old Nest Community forums.

We know Google could’ve done it because the brand moved some of its own posts. Posts on the Home and Nest Community are sparse for now, and many of the current ones are made by Google employees. Some of them have an interesting disclaimer at the top, like this one concerning Google Home app hot water support: “This post has been migrated from our legacy Nest Community. Please note that the original publication date and some formatting may differ from the initial upload.”

Google should’ve migrated old posts over to the new forum to preserve the vast community knowledge they contain. It clearly saw the value in protecting its own posts, and I’d argue the value of the community’s knowledge at large is even greater. Alas, Google chose to start fresh. That means the burden of preservation falls on Nest Community users like you and me. If we want to keep years of forum data on the web, we’ll have to manually archive it or migrate it ourselves.