Question How to enter messages into Kunena from another forum

I have redesigned a website for a client who already has a forum on a free web design site called Citymax. There appears to be no way to export the existing messages.

What's the easiest way to get the old messages into Kunena?

If you can't get an export from City Max there is really no way to import them to Kunena other than cutting and pasting. Check with City Max and make sure you can't even get a csv (comma seperated values) export. You may be out of luck because a lot of these companies don't want you to be able to export your data because it keeps you with them.

I'm pretty resigned to cutting and pasting. Can I do that in the backend? Or do I need to make dummy users and enter via the frontend?

I've never tried this, but I would think you would want the posts to look like they were from different users. In which you will have to create dummy users and do it from the frontend.

We have had many questions in the past about converting/migrating messages that were posted into these so-called free-hosted website, these "three-mouseclicks-and-you-have-a-discussion-forum websites." One of the bitter lessons that people eventually learn from these "free" packaged website solutions is that they're not totally free at all. These free solution providers don't offer their solutions for nothing; they derive their income from advertising. You need to look carefully at the Terms of Service conditions that are published on such sites (e.g. CityMax ). More often than not you will find that you do not own your forum data at all. In other words, everything that you posted on those packaged solution sites is owned by the company that hosts your forum.

Many of these companies are very reluctant to disclose details about how the data is stored, even to the point of not disclosing what kind of database software is used to store the data. Sometimes you might be lucky and the solution provider might give you some means of exporting your forum data in, say, a CSV file format. But the forum data is useless without the details of the users who created those forum messages. So, yes, they might be able to give you the form messages but, I would imagine, they might be less co-operative in giving up details about the users who have registered with their services.

This is something that you need to discuss with CityMax .

Hi Sozzled, yeah I'm figuring this out. Unfortunately, the old website was set up by my clients 18 months back, and they recently came to me because they weren't getting the traffic they wanted. So now I'm stuck with migrating them over. Unfortunately, there's a bug in the latest Kunena whihc stops me entering them as a guest, so I'll either have to wait or make dummy accounts for everyone.

Life's not fair, get used to it! ~ Bill Gates :laugh: