Solved How to reassign all of one user's posts to a different user?

I just finished migrating from Fireboard 1.0.0 on a Joomla 1.0.12 site with CB 1.0.2, to Kunena 3.0.5 on a Joomla 3.3 site with CB 1.9. It was quite an elaborate sequence of steps, but amazingly everything works perfectly.

There is, however, one minor inelegance that I would like to fix: For better security, the SP Upgrade component created a new SuperAdmin user during the Joomla core upgrade so that hackers can't count on the SuperAdmin's userID always being 62. The new SuperAdmin is given the username of the old one, and the old one's username now has "v15" appended to it. SP Upgrade intends that I demote user 62 for security, and use the new SuperUser identity from now on.

The problem is that I was the forum moderator as well as the SuperUser, and there are many posts displaying the old username. I want all my old posts to display the ideal (original) username, but I also want all my future posts to appear with the same username, despite me using the new userID (for security).

(Visitors should see that all the posts are from the same person, not two. I also want the statistics for that user to be right.)

Although it's easy to change both usernames, two userIDs can't have the same username.

A simple solution would be if there is a tool or script that would reassign all of user 62's posts to the ID of the new SuperAdmin user. Then the old username can be assigned to the new userID. User 62 can have any new name at all, since it will never appear on any posts; in fact, user 62 could even be deleted.

Does Kunena 3.0.5 have an easy way to move all the posts from one user to another without screwing up statistics or anything else?

(Wordpress has this. When you delete a Wordpress user, WP asks you to whom it should move all the deleted user's posts and comments.)

If not, can I just write an SQL statement in phpMyAdmin to change all the 62's in the messages table? Or is there more than one table involved? I don't want to screw up stats or "last post" info, combined karma, rank, etc.

Thanks for your attention.

You're on the right path. We discussed something similar a few years ago and this may help: How do I change topic creator?

Yes, I understand the difficulties involved in migrating from a really old version of Joomla to J! 3.3 (and taking Kunena along for the ride in the process). I also understand the fact that the migration can be complicated by a change in user id for the primary super user. As an aside, it is not a great idea to post messages on a forum using a super user account, but that's just a matter of opinion.

If you want to reassign existing messages posted on the forum by the primary super user you would need to modify the database tables _kunena_messages and _kunena_message_txt with a bit of SQL and you should be OK.

Karma (I never use it and there's no support for it in K 3.1): I couldn't say. The impact is probably negigible but you would need to dig around the database.

Easy enough to recalculate the statistics: there's a built in tool in the backend to do that.

I hope some of this helps. Good luck.

I can confirm that there's no tool in Kunena to convert one user to another. The functionality does exist in forum migrator component, though, but it hasn't been updated for a while.

What you need to do is to look to every table and whenever there's userid stored (field name can be different), you need to convert those to match the new id.

"It's not a good idea for SuperAdmins to post in the forums"

OK, you have convinced me.

Even tho' I *could* do what I had wanted, I will use the new (SuperAdmin) ID only for the back end, and will use the old (demoted to 'registered' but still the Forum Moderator) ID only for the front end.

So I can leave the posts alone.

Thanks, all.