UI: Topic and Category Export/Import

feature
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Hi,

Thanks for the tool. Though I’m an admin on https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ I do not have access to the server to run a command line tool. Could the tool be made accessible to the admin page?

The current installation is a pilot to test an alternative to existing mailing lists like wikimedia-l and wikisource-l. Someone would like to have access to dumps or exports of all posts.Your tool provides access to all posts of a category. Said user would also like to have access to all meta data. Would that be possible?

I had already found the way to export or download all posts of a single user. But I haven’t found a way to export or download all posts of all users, not even as an admin.

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Interesting, this may fit into our Mozilla grant that is focused on improving mailing list parity.

In this case I guess you are asking for something similar to this page:

http://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-general/

Where you can just download a big pile of posts.

@erlend_sh perhaps add this to the mailing list, Mozilla grant, todo list?

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I don’t quite understand what you’ve read into this @sam. Isn’t OP just talking about having a button for downloading all the posts of a specific category? I.e. a bare-bones UI on top of the existing CLI tool.

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Yes, but he wants ANY user to have access to it, and allowing downloading of 5 years of forum posts to anyone is not something we that really would be that useful…

Download monthly archives in mbox format… I can get that mailing list folks may want something like this.

I guess a good question for @Ad_Huikeshoven is Why? Why do they need to download all posts in a category?

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One of the features they currently have is to download monthly archives. The question is not exactly to download all posts in a category. The question is more like to have the same features on Discourse as with mailman. With Discourse a user can download all their own posts and replies. Would there be a possibility to download monthly archives with Discourse?

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Just to expand on this, what are people going to do with this data? Are they trying to import it somewhere? What format are the expecting?

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Hi @sam

On forum.plentymarkets.com we use discourse as a community support platform.
We have a lot of full time community support engineers whose main job is to resolve customer issues and keep many different conversations going.

Our user base is rapidly growing and we currently do not have an easy or transparent way in discourse to measure user activity and the corresponding support overhead it generates (i.e. it is not easily quantifiable).
Being able to export data on topics or categories form a certain date range that can then be run through some spreadsheet magic would therefore be really helpful.

I am aware of the command line option, but an export button is always nicer considering we have a lot of non-admin users that also need that data to help with resource planning.

Curious what your thoughts are on this and whether or not you would consider implementing an export feature.

Thanks
David

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You can already download a complete Postgres database for your Discourse and analyze it using any tools that work on Postgres, via Admin > Backups.

If you are on the business hosting plan, you’ll also have access to the Data Explorer plugin, which allows you to run ad-hoc data queries in the browser against your live site data.

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