Topic: Importing messages from a CSV file?

[mosk22rte]

SMF Version: SMF 1.1.3
Hi all,

I'm new to SMF, so apologies if this question is a simple one that outs me as a noob.

I am the moderator of a Yahoo group, and will be moving this group to SMF. I have an archive of approx. 12k messages that I'd like to move over into the new SMF-powered forum. Because the forum is dedicated to a technical discussion, searching through these older messages for solutions is very useful.

For argument's sake, let's say the messages are in a single CSV file, with columns for date, subject, author, body, MessageID (unique serial ID), and TopicID (non-unique, and used to group similar messages into a single thread).

1. Is there an easy way to import these messages into a single board/child board? I am comfortable with assigning all the messages to a common author (e.g., "OlderArchive", etc.) - I just want the messages available to the search feature.

2. Ideally, messages with a common TopicIDs would appear as separate messages in a single thread.

3. The ideal solution would probably also allow me to import or bulk create memberships for the members of the Yahoo group, but as I said, if that isn't possible I don't mind losing the Author column.

4. I don't need to keep the original TopicID and MessageID columns once the messages are imported, so these can be considered a pre-import grouping mechanism; I don't need to preserve these.

Thanks for your help,

-Jeff

[bassbass]

Jeff, were you able to convert from CVS file?

[mosk22rte]

Hi bassbass,

Not yet, I've been tied up with a project at work, so my SMF project, which is personal, is on hold. At this point, I've extracted all the messages from my Yahoo group and ran them through a filter to remove the HTML. Of course, this only removed *some* of the HTML, so I now need to go through them with another filter and do some more cleanup, extract the subjects and author, and sort/group by subject, and assign thread numbers. I'm about half way done with that - it needs a few more hours, and I won't have the time until the weekend.

Hopefully, by next week I'll have a CSV file ready to import. I can post results then if you are interested.

-Jeff

[bassbass]

Thanks Jeff for the reply.

[JayBachatero]

Still need help?

[bassbass]

Not anymore for me, thanks Jay.

[apsara]

How have you managed to do the conversion? I am looking for an answer to this question. Using pgoffline, i managed to get 11k messages to a database. now how do i get them on smf? how do you filter out html. the messages are in html.
can anyone please answer

[SleePy]

As long as nobody edits the posts, then you don't need to really worry about them being html.

[apsara]

Thanks but no thanks. How do I get the offline database on to SMF. How do i provide an interface where users can access old yahoo messages and maybe even able to search it.