Manually Migration Guidelines (from WebWiz)

Installation
1

Hi all. I have an existing forum in WebWiz and I’d like to migrate to Discourse. It’s a big forum with lots of specific stuff. It doesn’t look there is an automatic WebWiz to Discourse migration tool, and even if it existed, I believe I would need to do some manually tweaking anyway.

Are there guidelines about how to do migration? How to create new posts? How to create new users (can I create users for all my existing users in old forum)? How to associate posts to users, how to associate replies, etc.?

There is a suggestion here to migrate a forum to Vanilla and then migrate Vanilla to Discourse. Has anyone tried this approach, and has anyone migrated from WebWiz to Discourse? Import Via Vanilla

Thanks in advance.

2

The source code for existing importers is the way to find out how importers work.

If you don’t care about losing information then the vanilla path may be useful. If you have lots of custom stuff as you say, you’ll want to have code for your exact situation.

I’ve done dozens of imports and have written several custom scripts. See Migrate to Discourse Discussion Platform from your current formum software. for some information about imports.

3

Thanks @pfaffman. Actually I didn’t mention lots of custom stuff, why did you imply that?
Regarding losing information, do you know what kind of information would be lost using vanilla path?
Thank you for the link!

4

If you don’t have lots of forum-specific formatting or features you’ve used the import via vanilla route might just do the trick! If you have fewer than 100K posts, it won’t take that long, so you can give it a shot.

5

We recommend to use gConverters.com to migrate WebWiz to vBulletin, and then convert vBulletin to Discourse. It is by far the easiest path.

We can take care of the entire project, or just the last vB -> Discourse step, PM me if you want to know more.

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6

@pfaffman and @michaeld I can’t find a way to send private messages. Maybe it’s because I’m new user and don’t have enough badges? If you can please PM me then, thank you.

7

I responded to your query on my site, but sent it to the wrong address. You should have a message from me in your mailbox now.

You can find Michael here: https://www.communiteq.com/contact/

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