Thanks Coin-coin. If we scrub anon users from the user data file before importing, I assume all anonymous posts will be assigned to the ‘system’ user as they are anyway. Is there any reason I may not be aware of to keep the anonymous users from our phpBB instance in the import file?
I’m gathering from this and other threads such as…
The issue for us seems related to the anonymous users, which are essentially duplicate users that do not exist in WP, a fresh import to WP which changes the structure of WP user IDs but not Discourse IDs by eliminating newly-created WP test users, and the fact that Discourse tries to associate users first by external WP ID.
When we do a fresh import, it removes some WP test users from the database. User IDs of a couple of anonymous phpBB users that I searched for all appear to have the highest integer user IDs in Discourse (4505, 4506, etc). So it seems when we run a fresh import and delete test accounts in WP, a newly created user in WP then gets synced by the old ID of the now non-existent old test user.
By forcing users to be matched by email instead of external ID during the fresh import, as described in post #5 linked above, we should be able preclude the possibility of any unwanted merging of old and new users.
Does this all sound reasonable?
Thank you