How possible would it be to merge all the posts from the old boards over to these new boards? There's an insane amount of info on those old boards and it'd be kind of a pain to have to keep tabs on both and search both (especially as more info accumulates on this board... remember which board contained which post will be hard... it's already hard enough to find the specific post you're looking for sometimes).
Anyway... it'd probably be a pain the the rump to move everything over... and I know how boring and irritating easy web maintainance stuff is... so i know it's a longshot. I thought I'd bring it up anyway ;D
Yeah, I don't know how the stuff can be moved over, or if it can. I think koitsu had looked into it, I mentioned it on the old forum at least.
I remember looking around a while back and seeing programs that could convert forum databases to work with other forum software, but not between the combination we've used.
Probably would be a pain to do.
Can probably be done with a little perl programming,
I used to do this stuff all the time serveral years ago, I'm a little rusty though.
I would assume that all the old messages on in text? no binary files?
The old board used a MySQL database, and so does the new one.
Also, there's the issue of which post belongs to which user.
I suppose you can do something like creating a "general" account or something, and then putting the user's name in the sig or something like that or something something. Something.
But why not just start blank? I mean, the old posts are all still available anyway...
How do you sanely convert the messages in a threaded message board into a linear message board?
perhaps by prepending a post ID # to each post (e.g. in the subject, which this forum system seems to have) and having replies being listed as "Re: 182342" or whatever. it'd be harder to follow than it would be in its native environment, but better than nothing.
There is no point in doing this, for the old boards are still available for reference.
Hyde wrote:
There is no point in doing this, for the old boards are still available for reference.
Indeed. Plus, if there's something essential, it could be assembled in a document, couldn't be?
Let the old forum available and that's ok. I wouldn't like to see this new forum overloaded with all those old posts...
The old boards are backed up right? It would be a shame to lose all of that info.