Migration from phpBB script

[dginovker]

Hey folks! This ticket will probably sit stale for a while but I want to post it to see if there's any interest besides my own.

I currently frequent two phpBB forums, neither of which I'm anything more than an average user of. I don't have any power in decision making, and any significant requests (like migrating to LemmyBB) would rightfully be ignored. That said, going to individual forum websites is outdated tech, and federation like Lemmy is an excellent way to bring people together.

In an effort to bring these existing forums to the convenience of Lemmy, without being a burden to website admins who rightfully fear messing with legacy applications, I'm suggesting a migration script that can set up LemmyBB from an existing phpBB instance.

Anyways, give this thread a good ol' ❤️ or 👍 if you agree 😄

[dessalines]

Someone wrote a Reddit -> Lemmy database import script, you might be able to use some of the techniques there, if you know how the phpBB database is set up.

[mattbk]

Although I don't entirely agree that

individual forum websites is outdated tech

this idea is rad (and should be expanded to SMF).

Would an import script have to deal with the potential to flood federated instances with "new" posts, or is that solved already? That's one of the arguments Gargron makes for not allowing post migration on Mastodon.

Also, I love the lemmyBB idea and hope to use it or another variation one day. It solves my problem of wanting to replicate forum functionality without the focus on upvotes. ❤️

[Nutomic]

Would an import script have to deal with the potential to flood federated instances with "new" posts, or is that solved already? That's one of the arguments Gargron makes for not allowing post migration on Mastodon.

You could disable federation first, do the data import and then enable federation. Anyway there is nothing technical that would prevent you from importing data, you just use the normal api.

[Nutomic]

There is a tool Nitro Porter which allows data migrations from a lot of different forum platforms. It doesnt currently support Lemmy, but that could probably be added.