We use vBulletin 4.2.3 for our community, but we are thinking of switching to Discourse.
Currently our forum has 1.660.000 posts and 14.000 members.
Moreover, our forum’s database (mysql) is not in utf-8 encoding, so we or the person taking over the task should take care of converting it first (or during the migration) to utf-8.
Our main application/website (and forum) is hosted in Amazon EC2 instances, but we have not decided yet wether we are going to install Discourse there too or in a different provider (eg Digitalocean).
When do you need it done?
As soon as possible.
What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
Since we have not yet decided if Discourse meets our needs and we have to test it out thoroughly with real data, we can go up to $100-150.
Of course, since I am not familiar with Ruby On Rails and Docker, the person taking over the task will probably be needed soon for other tasks too.
I’m interested and sent a PM. Here are a few notes about this kind of job for others who are interested in making such a move.
It will probably take a full day to run a 1.6e6 post import. A recent 230K post job I ran took 6-8 hours. If something goes wrong 8 hours in that requires you to start from scratch, it can take a long time. Your budget is probably reasonable for 160K messages, but probably not for 1.6 million.
If converting the data to UTF-8 is as simple as calling scrub, that’s one thing. If it’s anything more than that, you’re looking at potentially a significant amount of time fussing with translations. It’s impossible to tell until you start the job, though.
What you need is a proof-of-concept import so you can see if and whether it’s worthwhile to consider the move in the first place.
If you don’t have Discourse running somewhere already, then you need whoever does this job to set up Discourse for you, as the backup file that one would supply you with isn’t really going to help much, so you’re asking for this to be done as well.
The possibility of future work makes the job more attractive, with the understanding that doing the import right will probably be a 5-20 hour job, not a 1 to 1.5 hour job.