10 years ago our forum software was out of date. It's been ten years and aside from a couple security patches it's still the same. Our server is reliable, but really we'd like to be able to do more. I've got over 9000 person posts, which means I've solved 9000 captchas, and if someone who was visually impaired wanted to post... nothing. We have no audio captcha or 'turn of captcha for this person' mechanic. We have no easy buttons to insert HTML, we have character limits on posts...
What we do have is about 10 years of useful information from several thousand members. We'd like to see if it would be possible to move that data over to a SMF, but we use a small, proprietary forum software from a site called Macwebsitebuilder.com. Here is a link to our forum page. (edit, can't post a link, so here is our address)
Modernbluesharmonica.com
The forum is 4 up from the bottom on the right.
My understanding is that usually there are plugins to move things from one set of software to another, but aside from saying that what they use is proprietary we don't know much about our hosts. I've been an admin on the site for years and I'm watching FB groups pull away members (we have a FB page too, but that's got it's own issues). Can anyone point me in the right direction. How would I go about moving our old posts to SMF so that we could maintain our knowledge archive? How about the membership rolls? Is there any way to do FB integration? (I know some sights let people log in with FB, but I've never seen a hybrid where you could bypass FB if you wanted or use it to sign in.
Any ideas on what articles I should read or any direct help would be appreciated. I've searched our hosts site for options to backup files, but can't find anything. Ideally they could host it. Failing that, if we could set a new integrated forum up with the old archives moved over and just link it from one of our menus. (In that case I'd need to figure out google page ranking stuff to keep it all under one roof, as it were.) I'm just an admin/volunteer. My programming skills have come up short other times I've tried to upgrade features. I'd really like this time to be different.
Thanks for any help,
Nate
The first thing that you'd need is a database dump from the forum/site from your host. That's the first step. If you can't obtain one, there is little to nothing that could be done. There are some scripts that do the conversion based on crawling the forum/site (without the dump), but you'd have to rewrite the scripts and you'd only get a database with members that don't have adequate login credentials (email addresses and passwords, a crawler can't get that info).
What is the forum software you are currently using? Or is it custom built?
Do you have access to the database?
It's custom software. I've never been able to find a backend where we can back stuff up.
It would be a custom job to do it. What kind of database format is it in?