Hello, I’m in the process of migrating from AnswerHub to Discourse. However, since I don’t have access to the AnswerHub database, I’ve scraped the entire website to gather the Ideas and their respective vote counts.
How can I override the vote count for a specific question in Discourse? For instance, the question “make a new recipe with oranges” has 42 votes on my AnswerHub. I have imported the question, but I would like to set the vote count to 42 instead of it defaulting to 0. This way, users can see the accurate number of votes for each question.
Is there a way to execute a PostgreSQL command to manually set the vote count?
Do I need to create 100+ fake users to simulate the vote count for each question? I hope not, as that’s not an ideal solution
This is a great question and I’m afraid I can’t answer precisely but maybe I can give some pointers as you seem to know a bit about coding (since you’re migrating from scratch)
The voting plugin uses 2 tables:
discourse_voting_topic_vote_count
Field Name
Type
Constraints
id
serial
primary key
topic_id
integer
foreign key (references topics), can be null
votes_count
integer
can be null
created_at
timestamp
updated_at
timestamp
discourse_voting_votes
Field Name
Type
Constraints
id
serial
primary key
topic_id
integer
foreign key (references topics), can be null
user_id
integer
foreign key (references users), can be null
archive
boolean
can be null, default false
created_at
timestamp
updated_at
timestamp
You may be interested in the plugin’s settings as well but I guess you’re already aware of them
Finally, topic voting must be enabled per category, so I’d enable them during the category creations in the import script.
As for how to properly populate the votes in the topic during a migration, I’m not an expert, but I guess I’ll go with having random, unique users for each vote, as a job prevents multiple votes from the same user and would delete duplicate votes:
I’ll populate the necessary fields (to be determined) and let jobs fill in other fields if there’s such a thing.
Wow, thank you for this great and helpful post!
I decided to opt for a different approach:
In my original website, I was able to retrieve the data on who voted for what, so I stored that information in a database. Later on, I used a Python script with the requests library to cast votes from their migrated accounts for the ideas they had already voted for, and voilà!
I’m no expert and I’ve never used this plugin 
