Poll: Which forum importer would you most like to see a tutorial for?

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Update: The votes are in and we’re now looking for technical writers looking to do some freelance work.

Continuing the discussion from Easier forum migration to Discourse:

The plan is to pay 2-3 technical writers in our community to each write a high quality tutorial for one of Discourse’s import scripts. I’m putting up this poll so our users can vote for whichever tutorial they think should be written first.

Some of the forums listed already have a dedicated tutorial, but votes on these are still counted. We’ll interpret that as “it’s in need of an update”.

Please vote on the forum you’d like to see an extensive tutorial for:

[poll]

  • Askbot
  • bbPress
  • Discuz (forum)
  • Disqus (comments)
  • Drupal
  • GetSatisfaction
  • Jive
  • Kunena (latest)
  • Lithium
  • Mbox
  • Muut
  • MyBB
  • Nabble
  • Ning
  • Phorum
  • phpBB3
  • PunBB
  • SMF
  • Sourceforge
  • Vanilla
  • vBulletin
  • XenForo
  • Zoho Forum
  • Other (please leave a comment)
    [/poll]Continuing the discussion from Easier forum migration to Discourse:
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vBullletin 3 is the obvious choice - probably the most widely used platform around, even today.

However forget the step-by-step and just create an import script - these are available for all other major forums and it’s crazy DC doesn’t have any.

The XF import script is one of the best, you just put in the DB info of the old and new forum and it takes care of the rest.

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The list above in the poll is actually all the ones import scripts exist for, import scripts are here:

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I’m not gonna forget about the step-by-step tutorial, because that’s what this topic is all about. Trying to solve one problem at a time here. :dango:

If you want to discuss better methods of import, you can pop on over here and share your thoughts on the matter.

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Most users would not consider them proper import scripts, at least last time I checked they required you to do things like export you vB database into a CSV file then import from that and even then it did not import everything. Has it changed since then?

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Ignoring my suggestion/advice is your prerogative of course :wink:

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I am not ignoring them, I’m saying they don’t belong in this topic.

I have answers to your suggestions, but this is not the place for them, because this topic is about getting some tutorials written for the import scripts that already exist, which by itself is very doable and should not require much discussion.

If you want to discuss other methods, the topic I already linked to is the perfect place for that.

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9

I vote other, I don’t know why does not exist IPB (invision power bulletin) in that list :’(

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Good catch! It’s not in the list because there’s no script available for it yet. Unless a customer needs it we can’t make it a priority, but if there’s a lot of demand for it we could sponsor someone to work on both a script as well as a tutorial.

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Woltlab Burning Board 4 (WBB4 for short)

(German only but there rather widely used)

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I was also surprised not to see that on the list. It’s the software we came from and it’s fairly popular.

With that said I’m leaning towards voting SMF, simply because of the sheer number of people who use it and would likely benefit from an import tutorial.

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13

I’d LOVE to see a Mailman list-serve importer. :heart:

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My vote: Other/IP.Board

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It almost existed. I was all set to write the IPB importer when the customer told us to put it on hold. That was in January…

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16

Google Groups

Greetings!
Agustin

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I’m surprised Facebook Groups isn’t on the list? Could just be me, but it seems every business and everyone is starting a Facebook Group — and they’re all terrible and hard to follow.

I think a Facebook Group importer tutorial would be a big help to a lot of people.

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Well, that is bevause there is no importer for Facebook groups in the Discourse repo. And the importer I wrote hasn’t been updated in ages.

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Would it not be possible to write a generic tutorial for how to prepare everything in order to be able to run any of the import scripts - this is the issue I had/have with wanting to import 2 of my Kunena forums. The script kept failing because I did not have all “functions” installed in order to be able to execute the script correctly…

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Good question. I think it might be possible, but such a generic tutorial would be a lot easier to make after we have at least 3-4 in depth tutorials covering a complete import process from a to z. Then we can compare them side-by-side and see if there are some recurring commonalities that we could run through in a “Forum Import Basics” tutorial

5 Likes