I have an old forum here: https://thesapling.proboards.com, I was wondering if there’s a way to export threads from Proboards & move it into Discourse? My discourse instance is set up via a droplet on Digital Ocean. I looked around the support forums and saw migration threads for most major forums but not proboards?
Proboards does not provide a way to export data. This is done intentionally to prevent you from leaving their platform.
While technically possible, it’s a lot of work to retrieve all posts. You have to scrape every user, topic, post and like (which is made challenging by Cloudflare). You then have to sanitize the data by fixing weird HTML, quotes, URLs, etc. Finally you need a custom import script to move the scraped data to Discourse.
You basically need to decide if the effort necessary is worth it unfortunately because there is no easy option
I’ll look into exporting guys thanks for your insights! There is definitely a way to do it, the owner of https://www.elitefourum.com/ moved from proboards to discourse and moved all their accounts/posts with it. I reached out to the owner but he had help doing it so he wasn’t entirely sure but I’ll see if I can find out more.
It is probably as you say @piffy very difficult, very closed of platform to get things out of. I’ll do some digging and feed back if I find out anything.
Yea that’s fair. I did pay for a long time in the past. The premium version of proboards doesn’t add a whole lot to the service, it removes ads, allows a custom domain and lets you change your forum URL. https://www.proboards.com/forum-help-guide/paid-forum-features
They’re within their rights to keep everything in house. I’ll keep researching but if there isn’t an option for exporting data, then i’ll assume it’s likely not within their terms of service.
Okay so the other forum admin didn’t get back to me, but I found a way to export only my data. My threads/posts…in csv format. I don’t think that’ll be any use to anyone tbh.