Originally published at: Moving from Facebook Groups to Discourse
The following is a guest post by Martin Eriksson @meriksson On January 4th 2017, the news aggregation site cor.ax completed its migration from private Facebook Groups to a private Discourse community. Why the move? We used to have about 20 Facebook groups for people involved in a network of alternative media projects. Some of the…
13 Likes
I saw in another thread that this is no longer possible due to Facebook API issues. Is this true?
1 Like
I’m not sure, but Facebook goes out of its way to act maliciously at every opportunity. @hawk if the blog post isn’t correct any more we should update it?
5 Likes
Bumping this thread, is there anything new in regards of facebook group(s) export to discourse?
1 Like
2025, and I’m facing moving a 7k person group from Facebook to Discourse, and wondering what the best way to go about it is – first for the member base, and then, why not, posts? If there is any recent information or recent experiences in that matter I’d be super happy to hear about them (to avoid losing time trying stuff people have already tried and failed at ;-))
1 Like
Tell me if you can steal exploit member base and users emails. That would kill Facebook for good. And you, sorry.
But for posts you need a way to scrape content. Facebook has disabled it quite good, but sure — everything that shows in screens can be copied. That is how AIs and SEO/keyword-companies works.
But there isn’t a legit way for group owners (they don’t owe anything, nor can’t delete a group de facto) to do it.
Here I am a few months later, I hadn’t seen your response. This is actually giving me an idea: I could create a google form and ask people on the facebook side to fill it in, to capture the necessary info I need to create the users on the Discourse side… might make “switching over” a little simpler for people.
2 Likes
A search for scrape facebook group content shows there are a bunch of tools & services claiming to do this, for a price. Then you’d need a Discourse import script written. (And I don’t quite know how untitled group posts would import into Discourse.)
Short of figuring out how to import everything, is there any benefit in just trying to “simplify” account creation..? 
Registering for a forum doesn’t seem any harder than filling out a Google form, and if there’s extra special info you want to collect, it could be included as user fields on the signup.
If you collected user info via a Google form piped into a spreadsheet, and exported them to a CSV file, and imported them into Discourse, creating staged accounts for everyone… they’d all still have to make the effort to confirm their account and set a password anyway.
Importing everything is not really on my radar for the time being. However, any ideas to facilitate a first step on Discourse are good to take. To give you an idea of the digital literacy of my average member, many of them will find making a copy of a Google Sheet a challenge (with step-by-step instructions, written and video). They don’t know if they have a Google account or not, and if they do, they often don’t know the e-mail address associated with it. They often end up with duplicate Google accounts because the senior members helping with the Google Sheet copy find it easier to just create a gmail address+account for them, rather than try to access an existing account.
So even if using a Google form shaves off one step from the signup process, it’ll be worth it.
People are reasonably familiar with Google Forms. If I post a Google Form in the group and tell people to fill in their e-mail, name, other info so we can invite them to the community’s “new digital home”, they’ll do it. But if they have to “go to this other website” and create an account over there, it’s going to feel like a lot more overhead (even if strictly speaking, it’s probably the same actions on their part).
If we create the accounts and they get an invitation in their e-mail that they just need to click on, that makes it infinitely more easy.
That said, I haven’t extensively looked at what the signup process looks like, particularly with Facebook login activated, so maybe it really is simple enough that we can have them do it directly.
I just set up a whole bunch of log in services on my self hosted instance. Level of difficulty varied with the various services. Generally, the ones I use were pretty simple.
I use google all the time and set up that log on service right away and use it myself. I recently set up github log in and that was easy but I use github. I recently set up Discord and that was easy but I had a Discord channel. I recently set up X (twitter?) and that was kind of a pain (but I don’t use it)
I did not set up facebook because I don’t use it and don’t have an account and really didn’t want to set up an account. That said…
You obviously use facebook so my gut instinct is that it should not be difficult. There is a guide with step by step.
If a person on your facebook group follows a link you post, they should (?) be able to just click one button and be logged in. They will need their credentials (user and password) the first time but after that it is literally one click.
The reason I put a question mark above is because, like I said, I didn’t set up facebook log in service. But… every other one I’ve set up works just as I’ve discribed.
I’m not sure you are going to reduce friction much more then that. You post a link on your facebook pages. Follow this link to the new group interface, it has a lot of new cool features. They follow the link, land on a sign up page, click facebook log in (or whatever it says) and they’re in.
As Todd said above, the google doc idea seems redundant to me as well. Discourse’s log in and sign up works really well IMHO.
Let folks know you are not abandoning them but all the new stuff moving forward will be over there. Maybe create or pick out one of the some what simplified themes available.
edit to add:
I just read your posts in the facebook log in topic. I’d still try to get it set up. If it breaks in awhile, hopefully most will have signed up
Thanks! If it’s indeed as simple as “log in with facebook credentials”, that might be ok (though I suspect many members have no clue what their facebook credentials are… workaround would be if Discourse allows logging in through a notification in the app rather than username and password).
I actually used Facebook login myself when I signed up here (meta), but I can’t remember how it went.
I do know that when I created a Discourse ID and then wanted to “switch” to it, I hit a few snags.
Will test all this 