Merging two Discourse forums

I don’t follow. You didn’t try the IMPORT_SOURCE?

No. I didn’t realize it was not part of the Category Export import reference in the original post?

I finally got to run the IMPORT_SOURCE and it worked perfectly. Users were matched properly, and an incremental import with Gerhard’s phpBB importer completed successfully after the category import.

Thanks, @neil!

I want to merge a smaller discourse forum into a single category within my larger discourse forum. Both forums are native to discourse. I did not import anything from any other forum software. Both forums are running as separate stand-alone DO droplets (and are up-to-date). Naturally, I want all user logins, avatars, and data to transfer. Will the process laid out by @pfaffman work for this? Or, would a different process be more appropriate for putting the smaller forum into a single category?

I think that you want to do what’s described above

Thanks for the clarification (and reassurance). I get a bit nervous before I trying things like this. Will report back once complete in case anyone else stumbles upon this at a later date.

Did you have success?

I did. The only challenge I encountered was the usernames and email accounts merging - which wasn’t perfect. It was probably an error on my part because it was more complicated than I anticipated. After a ton of work, and hard conversations with established members, we decided to leave the past behind and start over (we originally merged from vBulletin which went well). In retrospect it was the best decision. We use AWS for all of our media uploads now instead of keeping any content on site which has kept costs down significantly. Full disclosure…I made the mistake back in the days of BBS to operate a political forum and continue to do so (I may switch to hockey or something a bit less stressful). Stale political conversations and bickering weren’t really worth saving…since the banter and bickering never stops and getting to thousands of threads isn’t so tough.

I could see how someone buying an existing community, merging separate knowledge bases, or combining corporate communities of practice would absolutely need a flawless merge. For my purpose it wasn’t a big deal. Apologies to all for not providing an update. When things didn’t go as planned and I couldn’t figure it out, I didn’t want to be a pain.

It’s still good to hear what specific areas gave you trouble so that future readers know to pay particular attention to them.

Thanks for the update!

Yes, thanks for the belated update.

It is really useful to hear about edge cases such as politics because your hard-won learning is a useful consideration for making decisions about similar categories and topic types in our forums…

Not sure if it was mentioned in this topic but there is a newer guide on merging two forums that might be of interest to people reading this thread: