Question Converting from proprietary forum to Kunena

I'm working with a non-profit organisation to try to convert their legacy forum postings to the new Kunena forum on their new website.

The old forum system has just two tables:

There is only one forum, and this will transfer into a single category in Kunena.
The first message in each thread has 0 for the inreplyto column, and all replies have the message_id of the first message. the lastpost column contains the date of the last post in the thread for first message records, and the same as the date column for all replies.

The author column just contains the author's name - not an ID that maps to the new Joomla system. It doesn't matter if the author's profile link doesn't work, as long as the text of the user's name is visible.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how we might get this data over to Kunena? What are the minimum fields in the Kunena tables that we have to fill to get this to work?

thanks for any help

EDIT: sorry for the formatting above - tried using code tags but it's not worked well.

G'day, Bertha, and welcome to Kunena.

I am assuming that you have a competent working knowledge of SQL and databases in my reply to your broad questions. You will appreciate that, of course, in a forum context like this one, you are basically asking for the complete documentation of the Kunena system, the relational database design and the way that these things are integrated/woven into Joomla. I hope you will forgive me when I say that this is next to impossible to do in a forum setting.

I have written elsewhere details of the tables that are needed to run K 2.0. A simple search of the word "table" and my username would point you in the right direction.

As far as the "minimum data set requirements" are concerned, we are all to well aware that as soon as one mentions "minimums" we're asking for trouble. The "minimum", to make Kunena work is, the table structures that you find when you install Kunena on. Joomla environment. Therefore, for someone with a reasonable working knowledge of relational database design, this should be quite straightforward. Ideally you should have some means of capturing your current user profiles but, if this is not possible to do, Kunena may still work but there could be complications downstream. In this event, you effectively need to segregate the imported data for. The data that will grow naturally by making sure that the old data does not, in some way, become tangled with new data.

Minimally, Kunena messages are stored in two tables: kunena_messages and kunena_messages_text. Populate those two tables and you will have a minimum data set. Good luck.