[PAID] Import/convert from generic mySQL DB

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What would you like done?
Import forums, topics, users, and messages from a long-dead forum.

When do you need it done?
Next few weeks.

What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
$400

I have data from an old forum based on “WebBoard” software which has hasn’t been functional for many years and I’d like to get it imported into Discourse. I will later convert an active phpBB2 forum and combine with this (but that is not part of this request).

The old forum data is in a 20 MB mySQL database, in 3 tables:

  • forums (19)
  • users (734)
  • posts (31,074)

Table structures look like this:

forums
  ForumID
  ForumName

users
  UserID
  UserName
  FirstName
  LastName
  UserEmail

posts
  MsgID
  ForumID
  UserID
  TopicID
  TopicTitle
  PostDate (format: 1999-06-29 09:15:50)
  Body

Many of the users’ email addresses are bad since the forum is old, so I’m not sure what would be the best way to handle that. If the users are deactivated but posts retain the user’s real name, I’d be OK with that.

Messages are grouped by TopicID, and are in order based on the PostDate. There is no threading, all replies are in sequence.

There is no need to redirect any links or fix formatting of content.

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But not all of the topic titles are the same for a given TopicID. Discourse has only one title per topic/thread. I guess just use the first TopicTitle?

Actually. something’s wrong. TopicID 4 has one TopicTitle “HUD” in 2000 and the others are all “$3.00 a gallon…” in 2004. Hmm. I don’t see any others. Perhaps that’s a fluke.

Well, no. TopicID 12 has multiple titles as well.

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I see TopicIDs are not unique. They are unique only within a forum.

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Let me check and tweak if necessary.

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It would be best if there were a parent_id that was the first post, but I am pretty sure I can make this work.

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I believe the best thing to do for this is to prepend an extra line to the post when the title was changed.

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Jay was faster figuring out how to do the import with the flawed data than I was cleaning it.

Props to Jay for a quick solution. :thumbsup:

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