I am try into find information on how to use the new mybb.ru import script just added to latest Discourse 2.4.0 beta 10 version (according to the changelog)
Clicking the link in the changlelog takes me to what is presumably the author’s site (in Russian), which seems to offer no obvious information about the script.
Is some import functionality now built in to the administrator user interface somewhere?
My objective is to import the users and posts of my old MyBB forum, in a more elegant and user friendly way than the awful existing separate procedures associated with import script mybb.rb that I simply cannot get to work, due to a bewildering array of prerequisites that turn out to be necessary for running the script that I cannot successfully create in either a development environment or the production server.
No, this isn’t in the user interface. All our import scripts are intended to be run in a development environment. You can find all our import scripts here.
Thanks Joshua. Sadly I keep running into brick walls (cryptic error messages, that google searching does not resolve for my context) when working through the steps in the guide associated with the script, that I just have not been able to solve, and that would likely require more years of Linux and Ruby experience to solve than I have left on this earth.
The migration process for owners of forums on other platforms like MyBB would be SO much more appealing/feasible if this barrier was removed and importing functionality was available via the user interface.
No doubt! It’d be great it we could build the functionality right it, but unfortunately every forum, even two running the same software, is a bit different when migrated. There’s always a little something that has to be changed with the script, so you really want a developer, someone who knows Ruby, helping. There are also resources out there to help - for example check out Jay at Literate Computing.
Thanks Jay - sadly hiring developers is tough within the $0 budget available to volunteers running small free community forums like mine. I have actually tried going down this path with a couple of low cost freelance developers (using personal funds) who claim Discourse experience, but nothing to show for it so far. I guess you get what you pay for/can afford.
The biggest hurdle so far seems to be in achieving a development environment that allows the script to actually connect to the running MySQL service without cryptic socket errors and the like, that apparently no one on the internet has ever resolved…
Since presumably any successfully installed Discourse instance (which I can achieve in the same development environment) has inherently solved most or all of the problems around interrogating databases for its own purposes already(?), to my (uninformed) way of thinking some way of invoking the import script from within Discourse seems intuitively desirable if only to harness that ability and get you to square one, accepting from there it will still require a lot of trial and error and edits of script to get everything parsed correctly from a given source database.
The phpbb importer has instructions for creating a container with mysql. Whether they’ll make enough sense for you to be able to run mybb in it I don’t know.
Thanks Jay.
Following the importer instructions for setting up environment and running MyBB database appears to work, at least to the extent that I can see the expected tables.
Things seem to break down when Ruby is invoked and tries to connect to it (which I described in more detail that thread)