Here are some things to check before you launch your new Discourse community if you’ve recently migrated to Discourse from another platform.
Please follow this list carefully and do a thorough review. Fixing things after the site is live can get quite complex, so it’s important that you catch any issue before launch.
Users
Check that:
- You are able to sign in to your own migrated account
- Admins and moderators accounts are imported with the correct permissions.
- Admins and moderators can sign in to their accounts.
- Look at the migrated accounts for your top contributors. Check they have the correct data:
- Email address.
- Avatar.
- Background image (if applicable).
- Profile fields: name, birthday, bio, website, location, timezone, joined date, last activity date, and other fields.
- Stats: the number of days visited, topics created, likes given and the rest of the stats in the Summary page correspond with the user migrated activity.
You can view the profile data in
your-forum-domain/u/username/preferences/accountand the stats inyour-forum-domain/u/username/summary.
- Banned and suspended users were migrated with the correct state.
- User groups were imported with the correct name, settings and members. You can check
your-forum-domain/gto see all groups. - User titles, if imported.
- Your non staff users have the right trust level and correct privileges in your forum.
- If importing badges, check users were granted the right badges.
Categories
Check that:
- All your categories were migrated, with the correct name and description.
- If you had sub categories, they were migrated to the correct parent categories.
- If you had more than 2 levels of categories, all the sub-sub-categories were migrated in a way that you’re satisfied with.
- If you had private categories, they have the correct permissions.
- If you had subcategories in the private categories, they have the same permissions (or even more restrictive permissions) as the parent category.
Tags
Check that:
- All tags were migrated and applied to the right topics. You can see an overview of the tags and the number of topics they are applied to in
your-forum-domain/tags. - If you had tag groups, they were imported correctly.
- If you had private tags, they have the correct permissions.
Topics and posts
Find at least 5 different topics in the new Discourse forum. Now find the matching topics in your current forum to compare. Pick topics with a lot of activity and replies.
Check that:
- The title of the topic has the correct formatting.
- Posts’ authors are correct.
- Posts have the correct number of likes and those likes were given by the right users.
- Posts that you wrote are still assigned to you.
- Post content formatting is correct:
- You are satisfied with the way embedded images, videos, and attachments were migrated.
- Mentions have the right username and link to the correct user profile.
- Emojis were migrated and are loading correctly.
- Quotes mention the right user and link to the correct post.
- Special characters (for ex., Chinese characters or accents) are loading correctly. There aren’t any characters where they don’t belong.
- HTML tags or other markup languages’ tags are parsed and displayed correctly.
- Other elements like votes, solutions, polls, code blocks and tables are formatted correctly.
- Links to users, categories and posts redirect to the corresponding migrated content in Discourse.
- Deleted topics and posts were migrated to your satisfaction.
- Whispers, or hidden posts, were migrated.
- Topics have the correct stats: view count, reply count and like count.
You can see this data at the bottom of the first post in a topic:
Or from the topic list:
- Posts in a topic are in the right position, in chronological order or whatever other expected order.
- If edits were imported, last edit date and last edited by are correct.
Private messages
Check that:
- Private messages have the correct sender and recipient(s).
- As with posts and topics, private messages have the correct content formatting.
- Private messages are still private.
Redirections
Check that:
- Redirections were created. You can see them at
your-forum-domain/admin/customize/permalinks. - Links to users, categories and posts (outside and inside Discourse) redirect to the corresponding migrated content in Discourse.
Others
Depending on the type of your migration, you may want to check:
- Gamification points.
- Bookmarks.
- Calendar events.
- Watched words.
- Assigns.
- User preferences like notification preferences.
- Sticky topics.
- Chat messages.
Counts
Check that the correct number of objects was imported. From your old platform, obtain a total count of each main object imported. Compare it against the total counts in Discourse, post migration.
Check counts for:
- Users
- User Profiles
- User Emails
- User Groups
- Categories
- Tags
- Topics
- Posts
- Private Messages
- Likes
- Uploads
- Other: polls, bookmarks, suspended users, votes, solutions, etc.
In Discourse, you can get these statistics from your admin dashboard’s reports at your-forum-domain/admin/dashboard/reports or from the Data Explorer.
Note that depending on the platform you are migrating from, the total counts may not match exactly. For example, some platforms allow user records with the same emails, which is not allowed in Discourse. These records are usually merged into the same account, impacting the final total user count.
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.
And that’s it! Hope this helps and welcome to your new Discourse community 