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Possible to import into an existing forum?

embold_givenembold_given New
in General Banter

Hi there!

I've got a client who is using vanilla forums (appears to be the cloud version, not self-hosted) and they came across some old forum data from some Yahoo groups that they were wanting to bring into their existing forum in the form of legacy or archival data.

I did some digging and saw that Porter can import mbox data, but it also looks like Porter is intended to be for migrating from one platform into a clean vanilla forum, not something with existing data.

So my first question is: is what they're asking for reasonable? I'm sure it's possible given enough time and effort, but for legacy data, they're not going to want to devote more than a couple hours to it, I'm sure.

If it's reasonably possible, is there a tool like Porter that will import into an existing forum without nuking the existing posts and users and such?

Thanks!

Comments

  • R_JR_J Admin

    I guess there in no standard way to do so. But this is the OS version support forum. Your client should ask Vanillas customer support.


    Concerning if this is reasonable? I would say no, but if your clients demands to... 😁

    Theoretically you can import users without problems. Their ID will change though. If you change their IDs, that must be changed when importing discussions and comments, too. That's not that big problem, I'd say

    What might cause troubles is that the date of those imported posts will be before all current posts. I think normally data sets in Vanilla are sorted by ID and therefore you might find the sort order of discussions and posts will be messed up at several places.


    If they import those posts into one category "Archived Forum" and make that read only, the chances of conflicting dates/ids are much less.


    But you really need to speak to Vanillas customer support. They might have dealt with similar requests in the past and maybe even can good avdices.

  • LincLinc Admin
    edited June 2020

    You want this: https://github.com/vanilla/addons/tree/master/plugins/ForumMerge

    Import into a fresh Vanilla instance, then choose the current forum as the one you're merging into so the IDs are rewritten only on the archival Yahoo forum.

    I highly recommend practicing on localhost, and when you're comfortable, disable the site, download the production database, do the final merge on localhost also, and then overwrite the production database before bringing it back online. Backup everything twice.

    //edit: I missed the part that your client is on Cloud. Yes, this is a very normal request for Cloud service and they can do it easily. You will definitely need a budget for it because it's not a trivial task even when you're highly skilled at it. The amount of data in both sites will effect the pricing. As the person who wrote the mbox package (and many of the others), I can tell you it's also possibly the most complex of the imports because of how poorly the data is structured.

  • embold_givenembold_given New

    Thanks for the info! Next stop is customer support to see if we can work something out.

    Y'all are great! :D

  • demifuguedemifugue New

    Hi there, I'm looking to do something similar but am absolutely not highly skilled-- @Linc would you or someone else be willing to discuss to see what the price point would be?

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