Import threads from old site?

[SuperSlab]

Hi to all: my first post on the new forum. Looking very promising!

My question: would it be possible to import ongoing threads such as current proxy threads to the new site? There is a lot of important scheduling/rules/results info in some of those so I believe there could be a lot of value in working with proxy directors to bring pertinent stuff over.

Cheers

Alwyn

[HRW Chief Toiler]

Hello Alwyn,

Thank you for the post. Prior to going live with the new HRW forum, we spent a LOT of time and effort researching migration of topics/posts/attachments on the old forum to the new. Unfortunately vBulletin does not offer any sort of migration utility to facilitate this. We reached out to a couple of third party providers who claimed to be able to migrate our old forum but test results were very disappointing. There is also the matter of cost - even if the third party solutions had been viable, the cost was in the thousands of dollars. We also explored turning off new posts on the old forum selectively - forum by forum. The idea was to keep the currently active proxy forums open until they completed but shut off all non-proxy forums after some period of time. Unfortunately we don't have the ability to selectively turn off forums while leaving others active for posting.

It is possible to "migrate" existing posts for active proxies manually; however, it would entail quite a bit of effort. You could simply brute force copy/paste the existing posts one at a time from the old forum to the new in chronological order. This approach has some shortcomings - you'll lose the original date/timestamp and author (you could edit each post and include a note at the top of the post but again, more work). Embedded pictures should come across as posts are copied.

For anyone organizing a 2020 proxy that has already started on the old forum, we STRONGLY encourage you to make the switch to the new forum ASAP. Going forward, any new proxies setup on the new forum will not be an issue.

One point to reiterate - you will always be able to access proxy threads and posts (along with all other forum posts) in read only mode once posting on the old forum is discontinued.

We realize this is not an ideal solution but it's the best we can do with the cards we've been dealt.

[SuperSlab]

Thanks for the open and comprehensive answer Steve: I expected the answer/reasons would likely be something like this. But I had to ask..

Alwyn