# Socialengine importer **URL:** \ **Category:** Self-hosting\ **Created:** [September 5, 2019, 11:15pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/socialengine-importer/127748 "2019-09-05T23:15:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![rmccown](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/rmccown/32/155375_2.png) [@rmccown](https://meta.discourse.org/u/rmccown)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2019, 11:15pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/socialengine-importer/127748/1 "2019-09-05T23:15:23Z")
Has anyone hacked together an import script from Socialengine to Discourse? I’d hate to reinvent the wheel here. ---
**Author:** ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2019, 11:20pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/socialengine-importer/127748/2 "2019-09-05T23:20:51Z")
It doesn’t look like it. Can you get a database dump from them? If so, you can use one of the existing importers as a model. (See [discourse/script/import\_scripts at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/master/script/import_scripts)) ---
**Author:** ![rmccown](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/rmccown/32/155375_2.png) [@rmccown](https://meta.discourse.org/u/rmccown)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2019, 11:44pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/socialengine-importer/127748/3 "2019-09-05T23:44:26Z")
Yea, I didnt find anything either. Should be easy enough to import users and forums. I think forums/topics/posts become categories and their posts, and the users should just come across. I pull nightly backups from my site. I can load it into pgadmin and export out a CSV of the tables. ---
**Author:** ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2019, 12:46am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/socialengine-importer/127748/4 "2019-09-06T00:46:29Z")
Most importers pull from an sql database. Most use mysql, but there may be a couple that use postgres. You definitely want to avoid csv. ---
**Author:** ![rmccown](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/rmccown/32/155375_2.png) [@rmccown](https://meta.discourse.org/u/rmccown)\ **Post date:** [November 11, 2021, 8:45pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/socialengine-importer/127748/5 "2021-11-11T20:45:10Z")
Necroing this thread, but I _finally_ got around to getting this working and importing my SocialEngine forum over to Discourse. Took a significant amount of hacking and ugly code, but it worked. About 4800 users and 390k-ish posts. I did the post importing in chunks because the source DB would time out after a fashion. There’s been a bunch of post-importing processing, but overall the members seem happy. I _may_ clean up the code somewhat and post it as a “You can start here, almost guaranteed to not quite work right” starting point. ---
**Author:** ![rmccown](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/rmccown/32/155375_2.png) [@rmccown](https://meta.discourse.org/u/rmccown)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2021, 12:45am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/socialengine-importer/127748/6 "2021-11-16T00:45:25Z")
As threatened, I’ve cleaned up the code (removed all my FIXME, HACK, etc tags, and pp debugging output,) thrown together a quick README, and put it up on Gitlab. > **[Bob McCown / Discourse SocialEngine Importer · GitLab](https://gitlab.com/Rmccown/discourse-socialengine-importer)** > > A rough importer to import SocialEngine into Discourse. Probably will not work for you without changes. The code is ugly, hacky, and worked _for me_. I make no claims that it will work for anyone else. You have been warned.