Here are some things to check before you launch your new Discourse community if you’ve recently migrated to Discourse from another platform.
(Thanks @neil for initially putting together this excellent resource!)
Accounts
Have you been able to sign in to your migrated account?
Did all of your admins and moderators get migrated with the correct permissions?
Were all of your admins and moderators able to sign in to their accounts?
Look at the migrated accounts for your top contributors. Do they have the correct email addresses and profile information?
Find banned/suspended users in your forum. Were they migrated to Discourse? If so, are their accounts in the correct state?
Structure
Did all of your categories (aka forums) get migrated correctly? Are their names and descriptions correct?
If you had subcategories, did they get migrated to the correct parent categories?
If your site had more than 2 levels of categories, were all the sub-sub-categories migrated in a way that you’re satisfied with?
Posts
Find at least 5 different topics in the new Discourse forum. Now find the matching topics in your current forum.
- Are you satisfied with the quality of the migrated posts?
- Are posts assigned to the correct users ?
- Find posts that you wrote. Are they still assigned to you?
- If your forum had embedded images, videos, and attachments, are you satisfied with how they were migrated?
- If your site supports tags, are the topics tagged correctly in Discourse?
If you had deleted topics or posts, were they imported into Discourse?
Permissions
If you had private categories, find them in Discourse. Do they have the correct permissions?
If you had subcategories in the private categories do they have the same permissions (or even more restrictive permissions) as the parent category?
If you had private messages between users, are they still private in the Discourse forum?
If your site had groups, were they migrated correctly?
Log out of your account, or log into an unprivileged testing account. Is any information being shown that should be hidden?
Spam
It is crucial that you check for any spam posts or users that have been migrated over from your old forum. These should be deleted immediately or they will open the door to further spammers in the future. We can’t stress this step strongly enough.