Discourse export assistance needed

Migration
1

I’m new to Discourse and have recently inherited a ownership/admin of small, older Discourse community. One of the things I need to do is perform an export of the community’s content: topics, replies, endorsements, associations (author, participants), etc. in CSV, XML or JSON.

As a platform novice, how would I go about securing this export? I’ve performed a site backup, but I can’t do anything with the sql file in the tar.gz that I received.

I’m currently on the Standard plan.

Thanks!

(Updated to include that my community is on Discourse.)

2

The first thing to do is search “howto YOUR_OLD_COMMUNITY_SOFTWARE”. Then you look in discourse/script/import_scripts at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub. If you are coming from some platform that isn’t supported, the best course of action is to start with one of the existing import scripts. vbulletin might be a good starting point. If that’s not your style, then you can post in marketplace. I generally do a few of these a month.

If you are coming from a popular forum, you can switch to the business plan, pay for a year up front, and get it done for free.

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3

EDIT: @Charles.Dane Since you are using Discourse already, this is what you need to do:

Just download a backup and restore it to your new site.

You’ll need to contact support and have them restore it.

4

Hi Jay, appreciate for the response.

I just updated my post to specify the community I’ve inherited is already on Discourse.

Thanks for the advice to take a look at GitHub, I’ll see what I can find over there.

Cheers!

5

What do you want to accomplish with this?

7

Thanks for the response. My organization is in the process of investigating community platform options, and a review of the community’s content (in one of the three formats) will help us determine our overall scope of effort.

8

So your have some tool that you want to use to…somehow analyze the data in discourse? What is that tool? What is the analysis that you want to do?

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9

If you absolutely need a database dump in XML/CSV or JSON, why not download a backup and then convert it?

There are many tutorials online:

The process would be

  1. Download backup
  2. Extract backup
  3. Load backup into local postgres database
  4. Export the tables you wish to export as CSV/JSON or XML
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