While the vote on MyGaming’s new name is still open, regardless of outcome the idea is to migrate MyGaming onto the new forum software we’ve been testing here.
The technical process for this is still not finished. At least the following has to happen before I can execute the transfer/migration (completed tasks are struck through):
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Admin access to MyGaming’s hosting services.
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Transfer of MyGaming.co.za to me. This is non-blocking, but to do this properly the domain transfer should be done first.
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Transfer of additional MyGaming hosting services to me (e.g. Cloudflare).
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Test import/export of MyGaming forum posts to Discourse.
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Test import/export of MyGaming news posts into new publishing system.
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Migration of MyGaming.co.za to new hosting (and, depending on the vote, its new name).
- Migrate the forum.
- Migrate the CMS.
While I thought the first four steps might have been completed by the end of last year, things took longer than expected.
This is a bit of stream of consciousness post, so if there’s something that’s unclear that you are interested in knowing more about, please ask.
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Thank you very much for the update @SIGSTART. I think this is clear, and as long as we can be periodically updated on the progress as things move along, everyone should start feeling much more comfortable in posting and finding their feet here.
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I started trying to figure out the database export/import from vBulletin to Discourse over the weekend, but it is proving more challenging than I thought.
Even the easy part—getting the original forum database backed up—is proving challenging.
Hopefully the hard part—making all the old links point to the right place—proves to be easier than I anticipate it being.
If this doesn’t work, the next thing for me to investigate is to simply make a static archive of the old MyGaming forum and then we start fresh in Discourse.
It’s not ideal, of course, as I’d like to allow old members who don’t have accounts on MEW yet to simply be able to reset their password and jump right in here. There are also still a few active discussions on MyGaming in official threads that would be great to continue here.
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I’ve managed to pull a good copy of the original forum database and am busy importing it into a clone of this forum on a separate virtual server.
From what I’ve read, if everything goes well, Discourse makes it relatively easy to redirect links to threads on the old forum to the new forum. So what I thought would be the hard part might end up being easier than I thought.
The only problem is that the database import is quite CPU intensive and is taking really long on my resource-constrained virtual server.
I’ll have to investigate creating a copy on my local machine, running the import here, then copying the database back to the development server to save time. When I do this for real the import can’t be left to run for two days while no-one can post.
After the script has run there is going to be quite a bit of work to clean up the forum—duplicate accounts will have to be merged, posts will have to be recategorised and old categories deleted to make way for the new structure.
But things are now well underway!
Here’s a snapshot of the script running for those who might be interested:
...
16596 / 16596 (100.0%)
Creating groups membership...
Registered_Users
Administrators
Banned_Users
[Some groups redacted in case it's a security issue]
importing top level categories...
4 / 4 (100.0%)
importing children categories...
13 / 13 (100.0%)
importing topics...
41405 / 41482 ( 99.8%) [144 items/min]
importing posts...
157798 / 889588 ( 17.7%) [353 items/min]
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Thanks for the update @SIGSTART