(Superseded) Importing from Google Groups

Thanks @yanokwa for the name-check on my google-group migration script! This is a great HOWTO you’ve done here.

I keep meaning to update the importer script, but lack of time and a profusion of other projects keep getting in the way. I’ll get to it eventually. I can provide google-group=> discourse migration services and as part of any future work I’ll update and publish the script and hopefully put in some tests and proper production values so it can be maintained and pulled into Discourse core.

I took a look at it recently but I was a little confused by the current state of the mbox importer scripts - there are now two of them in discourse/script/import-scripts/ but there’s no documentation that I can find anywhere either in the source code, or in Meta, or any README.md anywhere.

As far as I can tell, discourse/script/import_scripts/mbox.rb is the original mbox importer, which was contributed to by (among others) @eviltrout @pfaffman @sam. I tried to use it for a straight mbox archive import recently and it didn’t work on discourse 1.9, but this may have been a problem with the mbox files I was importing.

Then we have discourse/script/import_scripts/mbox-experimental.rb, which has a little bit of documentation in the source code, but is not referenced anywhere in Meta apart from in this post. This script looks like it uses the code in discourse/script/import_scripts/mbox/ and has a yaml file for the import settings. It was contributed to by @gerhard @tgxworld @techAPJ, and would seem to have been updated much more recently.

It would be nice to have a bit more clarity around which one is the ‘official’ Discourse mbox importer (the older non-experimental one that works with 1.8 but not 1.9, or the newer ‘experimental’ one), and perhaps an updated/wikified howto for 1.9 mbox imports?

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