Question Problem after merging messages

I have a problem after importing some messages from another installation. The msssage tables and the message_text table look to be in sync (with id corresponding to mesid) but no message content is displayed in the forum - just the message headers.
Using K1.6 at
www.sciencefile.org

I moved your original topic to the Common Questions category because this is not, strictly-speaking, a support issue. If it was a support issue then you need to remember that we have certain rules about what goes in here.

Support questions are expected to conform to the posting guidlelines set out at the top of this page.

Support questions should relate to an unmodified, non-customised version of Kunena. There is nothing in the service charter of this website that defines any support obligations by the Kunena project to guarantee anything. There is no standard approach to moving database tables, for example, and if things don't work the way that you expect them to work this is outside the terms of what, in my opinion, falls in the ambit of "support". However, that does not mean that we won't try to help you in the best way that we can.

We can provide a general guide to moving database tables. We can advise what tables are involved in running Kunena, for instance. This is an open-source project, after all, and our task is to help everyone who asks for help to the best of our ability. However, when questions are posted in the support category this implies a different kind of response. Our task, in handling support questions, is to resolve those matters efficiently and effectively in order to make sure that a problem with the core product does not become a community-wide issue.

Moving database tables from one location to another location is not a community-wide issue. Problems are always bound to occur when you're dealing with such low-level complex issues like database export/import and merging messages from one forum into another forum.

Having written this, I'll turn to your specific matter at hand. It's difficult to know, with certainty, what may have corrupted your merged forum without knowing, precisely, the steps that you carried out when you did the merge. I wrote elsewhere (see Migrate my forum ) that this task is non-trivial and best handled by a specialist skilled in database management.

Without more information, I don't know what else we can say to advise you better.

Sorry - I thought I had posted it in the wrong place - didn't realise you had moved it - not trying to be a smartass, honest.
Unfortunately it wasn't me who did the sql merge - I'm standing in for Andy - he's just broke his ankle badly.
As far as I can tell he merged some messages from another version of the forum software on the same server. We had a changeover from the old to the new a month or so ago.
When I look at the front-end I can read messages up to 21st June 2011. After that the messages are blank. I've tried looking for an anomoly in the messages & messages_text tables where the ID/mesid correspond to the last readable message in the forum, but there is nothing obvious wrong with the next message.

In order to make Kunena to work, you need to import a lot more than just messages. You need to import all Kunena tables and you need to import Joomla users. If something in those tables gets changed (import from another software or merging sites), you also need to know how Kunena and Joomla work.

By the information you provided we know nothing what you did and there's no way to know what went wrong because of that. If you provide all the details what you did, maybe someone in the team is able to figure out what went wrong -- but without this information we cannot even guess what could be wrong.

Yes, I understand the problem.
What I got from Andy was:

I was going to use the MySQL REPLACE function to update, in forum messages linking to old forum message addresses, the URL to the new forum address.Now, there's a one-to-one relationship between jos_kunena_messages and jos_kunena_messages_text: the latter just contains the message text, linked obviously on message ID. I backed up this table before running the SQL

The SQL trashed the data (not sure why, but there seems to be a disagreement on the web over its correct syntax!). but no probs, I though, I'll just revert to the backup. So I dropped the trashed table and renamed the backup.

As I said, I can read messages before a certain date. Using the last message visible, I queried the messages and messages_text tables to identify the ID of that last visible message (happens to be 16320).
I figured (obviously wrongly) that there would probably be an anomoly in message 16321 so I checked the message and message_text tables (I checked the user id against the kunena_users table, and checked the parent, thread and catid fields to make sure they point to valid entries in the tables (which they appear to do).
There seems to be a correspondence between the id and mesid field in the messages and messages_text tables with no value in the id field that doesn't map to a corresponding entry in the mesid field.
That's where I am currently.....if there is any more info that might help I'll try to accomodate....I appreciate that this is not easy and I'm not expecting miracles, but if there are any general tips you can help with I'd be more than grateful....

PS - I'm actually making progress with it, so don't worry about this for the moment....I'll come back if I run up against a wall.....