Discourse export assistance needed

Support Migration

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Discourse Export Assistance Needed

Charles.Dane is seeking help to export content from a Discourse community, including topics, replies, endorsements, and associations, in CSV, XML, or JSON format.

After clarifying that the community is already on Discourse, pfaffman advised to download a backup and contact support for restoration. However, this may not directly address the export requirement.

RGJ and pfaffman questioned the purpose of the export, and Charles.Dane explained that the export will help determine the scope of effort for a community platform review.

sam suggested downloading a backup, extracting it, loading it into a local Postgres database, and then exporting the desired tables in the required format. A tutorial link was provided for guidance on exporting tables as CSV.

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.

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?

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