Migrating from Discord to Discourse

Product Support Migration

AI-generated summary

In a discussion titled “Migrating from Discord to Discourse,” ludwikc seeks guidance on migrating a 1000-member Discord community to Discourse, specifically asking how to automatically create Discourse user accounts with proper trust levels and transfer forum channel content. pfaffman notes that Vaadin’s migration didn’t include user accounts, but suggests writing a custom import script if account data with trust levels is available. ludwikc clarifies that Vaadin offered manual account migration for users with significant history, and asks whether documentation or direct guidance from Vaadin exists. Moin points to a Discord bot plugin that can copy message history from Discord to Discourse, capable of handling thousands of messages at once. Noah proposes a technical solution using the Discord API: users could link their Discourse and Discord accounts via OAuth, then a script could fetch their Discord forum posts and recreate them under their Discourse accounts using an API wrapper like disnake, which supports accessing ForumChannel data. The community is actively exploring both manual and automated approaches, with emphasis on preserving user identity and content history.

1

Hi there,

I’ve been searching the forums, but haven’t found the step-by-step guide just yet.

I’ve seen others (like Vaadin here: Moving from Discord to vaadin.com/forum - Vaadin Forum ) successfully migrating from Discord to Discourse.

I have an active community of just shy of 1000 people I want to move to Discourse.

My main 2 questions are:

  1. How can I automatically create Discourse user account for each Discord user (alongside with the proper trust level)
  2. What’s the best way to move the Forum channels content from Discord to Discourse?

Discord will stay in our techstack for video capabilities - daily calls and coworking sessions I run there, but we want to have Discourse as a main place for our long-form communication.

Is there a guide I could follow to make it happen?

2

From my quick read of their post

It looks like they didn’t migrate, they just left.

Can you get account information from Discord with proper trust levels? If so you can write an import script (see discourse/script/import_scripts at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub for examples).

4

Thanks @pfaffman - but they also said

we can manually migrate accounts if you have a lot of history in Discord and wish to associate it with your Discord account. DM us if you want to migrate your Discord and Discourse accounts.

This is my concern in here - since this is something that was done already - is there any documentation on it?

Is there a way to reach out to Vaadin and ask for guidance?

5

There is a discord bot plugin which

6

This could actually be quite possible by utilizing the Discord API.

Perhaps a way to do this would be to get the user to link their Discourse account to Discord using oauth. Then from there you can get all of their posts from your Discord Forums and then create the posts under their Discourse account.

Personally when I interact with the Discord API I use an API wrapper (Lot’s of alternatives btw) like disnake, as you can see the ForumChannel Object exists and from there you can perhaps then get the forums posts from there and then create these topics on discourse under ownership of the users discourse account.