how possible is a forum merge?

[1MileCrash]

i have two backups of different forums. how difficult would it be to merge them? (im not talking about me )

I searched for some threads on the subject, but never saw a post saying if it was doable or not.
Has it been done before?

How hard would it be for like...a mysql genious to do..im prepared to pay..

[al3x]

i believe it can be done. The issue is, it has not been done on smf yet... the only thoyght i have would be to convert the 2 forums to phpBB, merge them to 1 phpBB and then convert that back to SMF.. should work..

The other one is to do it in the database via a script which is the 'rational' way to do it.. however it needs expertise and time to write the script and noone seems to want to bother.

[Thantos]

Its just a matter of how you want to deal with the collisions.  Depending on how large the forum is, it might be easier to hand edit the backups to take care of duplicates and possibily to deal with non-duplicate collisions.

If you aren't worried about preserving things like the ID numbers you could set it up so it'll see if an item is in the database already and if not adds it.

The ease really depends on how large of a backup though.

[Gary]

I think being able to merge forums is a good idea. It should be able to take care of username duplicates. If a member uses the same username on each, they're merged too. And Boards with the same name should also be merged.

[Acf]

but what about if it is the same name and not the same user