Do you consider making some tools to help discuz users migrate to discourse?

migration
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Hi Discourse team:
My forum is based on discuz, the biggest Chinese forum application, which has a great amount of users in China. I’ve heard that many discuz users would love to migrate to discourse, but there isn’t a way to do so. discuz would not make such a migrating tool officially for sure, so do you consider making one? It’ll definitely bring discourse big numbers of users!
Thanks for your awesome work, I love discourse :smile:

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It is a good idea, we generally write and open source importers when we have a paying customer at the business hosting level or above, who needs an import from a common forum software. We just need to have that happen, or have someone contribute a converter…

@fantasticfears would you be interested in this? Maybe we could sponsor you in some way…

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@codinghorror
Getting paid to write an importer makes sense, but I’m afraid that most discuz users in business don’t care much about the forum application they use, the forum contents are their focuses, and Chinese users are so used to discuz that they seldom ask for changes positively. So I think it’s quite hard to find such a customer.
Regardless of this, since discourse is very young, I think its growth is much more important than making money, such a tool would bring discourse lots of users and promote its spread, which worths the money you spend writing such a tool

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Ok if someone can do this, has the right skills to write an importer, and has a good target forum for proving that they did it right by converting it from Discuz to Discourse… I would be open to sponsoring that person.

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@codinghorror I have a team of Rails developers, and have done some projects on Discuz. We are really interested in writing this importer.

@snakeninny Why not take your forum as the first user of this importer and we’ll start working on it : )

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@ryan_chang Sure, can’t wait to be the lab rat :wink:

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I want to build the import script months ago, glad to find @snakeninny is interested in this topic.

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I got a discus dump from @snakeninny and start experimenting it.

If you are curious, you can find the commit here: https://github.com/fantasticfears/discourse/tree/discuz

The progress may unfortunately be slow since Discuz got 297 database tables at this time and I can barely understand what is for what. The good news is the discuz has abundant data to get imported.

However I still need more samples here. If you want to import your large-scale Discuz forum into strikingly cool Discourse and are willing to provide the data, please contact me.

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Need this badly.
Would be so thrilled to see it becomes a reality, i’m sure many Discuz users will.

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Would you mind sent me a link of your Discuz forum dump to me?

The import script is almost working right now. I’d appreciate to see the complicated data set during the development process.

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Hi @fantasticfears, how would you like my discuz “dump”?
i don’t think i can send you PM cuz i just registered here.
my forum is currently offline, it’s got about 10k user IDs and several thousand threads (from a DX 2.5 installation). I have the database on my local machine.
Do you want me to register and move the conversation to http://meta.discoursecn.org if that might make things easier?

Thank you so much for getting back with me.

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You can send private messages now.

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Does the team can sponsor the importer after confirmed it’s actually working fine?

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Sure PM me with details!

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I haven’t forgot about you @fantasticfears
i’ve been really busy the past few days so i just started uploading the forum database, the upload folder & UCenter database to Baidu cloud drive. It’s got everything you need.
It’s 950MB large so it’s taking some time for the upload but once i have the link i’ll PM you.

Also, the forum was running on Discuz X 3.1, though not the latest X3.5 but i think it’s good enough.
There’s no major difference between the two releases (that’s also saying something, that Discuz has no hope since they got bought out by Tencent).

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Appreciate that.

I’ll try the importer to see what I can improve and upload a Discourse
backup for you once i finished.

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I’m really interested to know more about this importer.
I’m a marketing guy from a big corporation.
Who should I contact?

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You can see it in github https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/import_scripts/discuz_x.rb. If you host with discourse.org you can likely get a free migration. If you want to self host, you can read my migration faq here: https://www.literatecomputing.com/discourse-migration/

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