Viable import format for unsupported forum via API export [UserVoice]

[neatchee]

The company I work for has been using UserVoice as their feedback system of choice (against my urgings). They've finally been convinced that moving to vBulletin is a wise decision. UserVoice has no export options for its database, however it does have a half-way decent API which you can use to pull threads, comments, userinfo etc. My question is: If I write my own export program using their API, is there a simple (or relatively simple) format I can dump all the data into (since the forum is still relatively small) that I could then import into vBulletin 4.x? I know I can do a text userlist, but I'd like to get post data as well.

Alternatively, does anyone have a good method for using vBulletin API to do this? Take output from the UserVoice API as input to the vBulletin API? I don't really need to maintain user info on the posts, I just need the post content. So, if needbe, I'd be okay setting up a user account named "Migrated Content" and using that account as the "poster" for all the post data migrated from UserVoice. I took a look at the vBulletin API documentation but I'm honestly no programmer, so it was pretty overwhelming.

[Retal]

I would probably go for the quick and dirty method - export Uservoice posts into a TXT file and than make INSERT statements for the vB out of the rows (any text editor with regular expressions) and paste/import them to the DB via command line / phpMyAdmin.

On another note: Why are you switching from Uservoice to vB? Is Uservoice not good?
We were thinking of implementing Uservoice for user feedback on our vB forum, because Uservoice allows the users to vote on ideas.

[neatchee]

UserVoice is great if you're looking for a mono-directional user->company feedback system. The problem is that it has no way to post announcements/stickies, poor options for forum structure, and is generally just not great for ongoing/developing conversation. If you're looking for a way for users to recommend features/ideas and then let other users vote on them, UserVoice is great. Just doesn't cut it as the main forum for a beta program (which is what we need).

Is there documentation or a how-to somewhere for making the SQL statements I'll need? I'm a little concerned about formatting and making sure that all the necessary data to have everything inserted properly is present when I do this export.