I'm wondering (out loud), if we should have a special forum section for restored GoDiscussions threads.

I doubt I'll be able to figure out fully (or within a reasonable time period) how to import all the threads, but I can probably manually restore a select few old "stuck" threads.

If nothing else, this section might be a good practice stepping stone to figuring out how to fully restore all the threads (maybe). And then if that ever happens, then this can be deleted, right?

I've got a thread I'm trying to restore for Bill Spight now. viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4668
I'll just add it somewhere in the General section for now. Then if we decide to create a special place, you guys can move it there, right?

first restored thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4678

mysql -BN -e "select username, title, from_unixtime(dateline), pagetext from vb_post where threadid = '5728' order by dateline;" > thread-5728.tsv

(plus some not yet programed text massaging -- quoting quote tag names, unquoting url strings, replacing \r\n and \n with real newlines)

We can create a new place, and we can move threads. Just let us know when you need the room.

Please do not restore my books threads from GD here. Read my blog instead.

_________________
http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A private blog on Asian go books and interesting go sightings
Now open only for a select few.
Go is such a beautiful game.

tchan, do you realize that many pages of your book threads are still available on GoDiscussions?

e.g. https://godiscussions.com/forum/showthr ... 529&page=2

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Memories of a sorceress girl
Endless fascination with the secrets of the world

Yes I know they are currently available on GD. But I still have the option of logging into GD and modifying them to point to my blog once I finish transferring updated entries into my blog. But for now, I don't mind them being on GD. Having a further copy floating around on L19 is not the same.

_________________
http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A private blog on Asian go books and interesting go sightings
Now open only for a select few.
Go is such a beautiful game.

I don't really like the one thread I've restored so far -- each post by me.
Not to mention, it was quite time consuming to manually recreate it.

but one of the problems is the usernames may not match from there to here, or may not even exist.

Perhaps it would be better if I created a generic "godiscussions" user for each of the posts, including the original author in the post as I did here.

next, in order to automate it, I need to ask the admins here for at lest read access to the db here so I can map the schemas in order to generate some backend sql datafix scripts to better automate posting the newly restored threads. Then I can hand those to the admins here for the restoration.

Surely you don't mean one ID for all of them? That spoils the conversational aspects of some threads. Maybe just create GD001, GD002, etc, and map the non-migrated users on to them.

well, that is what I was thinking, but your idea could work too

it'll be a little more work mapping usernames, so I was almost hoping I could skip that part.

How badly is the database mangled? Say you just wanted the text of all posts, without worrying about who wrote what. How hard would it be to provide that?

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When you think your opponent has made a mistake, that's when you should be the most cautious.

its actually not that hard -- the only hard part is figuring out how to display the posts: 1) reformat to fit with this forum's structure (and what to do with mismatched/changed/nonexisting usernames, etc); 2) host the older original style forum; 3) just plain html format; 4) just plain text

life take over

here's a start:
http://www.eskimo.com/~wheelers/godiscussions_archive/