Importing Yahoo group messages

Started by Dan_, January 31, 2014, 10:20:30 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Dan_

I have rescued over 30,000 posts from my old Yahoo group using PG Offline software.   http://www.personalgroupware.com/index.htm

They have an SMF forum.  http://www.personalgroupware.com/smf/index.php

PGO will export the msgs to a .DB3 file extension.   I would like to import these into SMF.  Has anyone been able to do this..?

Thanks.

margarett

For anyone interested, I tried already but cannot really do it.

I managed to import a fraction of that backup to MySQL and I guess it would be possible to import that to SMF topics/posts.

The problems I found:
- There is no distinction between topic start/reply. It's all messages, which probably implies to compare by subject.
- The content of each message is stored as BLOB. No big issue here, *except* the fact that each message stores the full "history" until itself. Full HTML. To make it "forum-compatible", it would be necessary to find each part of the message, separate it and relate it to the "parent" one...
Se forem conduzir, não bebam. Se forem beber... CHAMEM-ME!!!! :D

QuoteOver 90% of all computer problems can be traced back to the interface between the keyboard and the chair

Dan_

Quote from: margarett on January 31, 2014, 11:01:02 AM
each message stores the full "history" until itself. Full HTML. To make it "forum-compatible", it would be necessary to find each part of the message, separate it and relate it to the "parent" one...

What I think you are seeing there is total lack of member "etiquette".  They never ever "trimmed" a post of the string of former replies.  Also most members had no idea how to start a topic.  They just wait until something shows up in their inbox and hit reply, no matter what the topic subject was.

I suppose it would be best to make an "old yahoo posts" category and make it read only...   Having these old posts available in our SMF to search through, makes it un-necessary for someone to have to join Yahoo to search.

evildrome

"What I think you are seeing there is total lack of member "etiquette".  "

That is precisely correct.

Each message in PG Offline is the exact HTML of each message in Yahoo.

If that message happens to contain the last 3 messages as well then there's not a lot to be done about it.

In essence though, how much of a problem is it?  No one says, Ha! I'm not going to use Yahoo groups because people reply to full messages.

There is a small utility to export PGO's message database to .CSV format (plain text).

Cheers,

Wilson Logan  (PG Offline Creator).


Kindred

What I did for an old yahoo group was use the RSS import mod --   I then parsed the Yahoo Group RSS feed to import the old (and future) messages.

I know of no good way to do the import from a scrape like the OP acquired...
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

evildrome

Just as an update, I have a procedure to import PGO databases of Yahoo messages to SMF.

info (at) personalgroupware (dot) com

Cheers,

Wilson Logan  (PG Offline Creator).

Kindred

Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

tonzodehoo

I know its an old post this but is there any substance to the method of importing a yahoo message database into smf?
I'd be interested to know what the possibilities are.

Kindred

We don't know, because evildrome never shared
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Advertisement: