The discussion revolves around a Discourse blog post outlining how publishers can create high-quality comment sections using Discourse. The playbook highlights key strategies, including using AI to screen new commenters for spam and toxicity, translating threads into multiple languages, keeping readers on the article page, assigning permanent threads to each article, and empowering regular users to assist with moderation. Setup instructions are provided for WordPress, Ghost, and other JavaScript-capable sites.
A significant portion of the thread focuses on the statement that “our engineers can move your old comments over for you.” stromfeldt asks for clarification on whether this refers to internal moves or imports from external platforms like Substack or WordPress. mcwumbly confirms that Discourse performs migrations from various publishing platforms and commenting systems, suggesting the official page be updated to list supported sources.
stromfeldt expresses enthusiasm for this service, planning to migrate colleagues’ publications to a shared Discourse instance, and hopes that support for platforms like Blogger is available. In response, mcwumbly explains that while open-source migration scripts exist, they require manual effort and often follow an “80% rule” where most data transfers easily but fine-grained decisions take more time. He notes that the team has developed many bespoke tools that are not yet fully productized but are working to integrate more capabilities into the open-source tooling.
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Plus, our engineers can move your old comments over for you.
What exactly is meant by that? That comments can be moved within a Discourse instance, or that Discourse engineers can somehow import comments from other publishing platforms, such as Substack, WordPress, Blogger, etc.?
This. We do a lot of migrations with customers moving from other community platforms to Discourse. But we’ve also done many migrations to help people move comments to Discourse from various publishing platforms (and other commenting systems). Maybe we need to update this page to list some of them: Migrating to Discourse | Discourse - Civilized Discussion
Wow, okay, that’s utterly fantastic to hear! I’ll be sure to reach out to the Discourse team about that when (in hopefully the next few months) I start migrating some colleagues from various publishing platforms over to their own Ghost publications, all under the umbrella of a single Discourse instance for commenting purposes.
Could be useful, yes, and while I’m gonna assume that Substack and WordPress are strong possibilities for this, and that Ko-Fi is not, I’ll cross my fingers in hopes that Blogger might be plausible.
Sounds good! Keep in mind, we’ve long included migrations scripts in our open source repo, but they do take some elbow grease to do the job, and the 80% rule applies to migrations. The first 80% takes 20% of the effort. For some that may be plenty. For others, we go to lengths to iterate on their particular migrations, helping people make fine grained decisions about what content to move and where to move it, but that does have a cost.
Our migrations team has created many bespoke tools over the years that we haven’t been able to fully productize, but we also have an ongoing effort to bring as much as we can into our open source tooling to enable others to do this kind of stuff too.
It just takes time to see the patterns and not everything generalizes easily.