Inject guest posts?

[LanceTrahan]

I was told to bring this over to this forum from vBulletin.com

Our old forum is using ActiveForum (ASP.NET) on top of DotNetNuke. Since I have found no current intention for a converter, I wanted to ask here.

I'm wanting to create an "Archive" forum on a new installation of vBulletin and essentially copy these posts into sub-forums beneath the Archive forum (which would represent the old forum structure).

We will not be transferring the user base, so I wanted to ask if there is a relatively easy way (given I have the individual thread/post information), to inject posts from the old forum into the new forum as named guests.

Basically, what is the bare minimum amount of information to create these "phantom posts".

Thanks in advance.

[cheesegrits]

Take a look at the build_new_post() function in ./includes/functions_newpost.php, and the class structures in ./includes/db_class_threadpost.php.

The former shows you how vB itself uses the datamanagers ('Post' and 'Thread_FirstPost' in this case) to add new threads and replies. Obviously there's a lot of extraneous stuff there, and it is getting the data from posted data rather than an external table, but it's easy enough to pick out the bones of what you'd need in your script. Note the way it picks a different datamanager depending whether this is a new thread or a reply. Also note what it does if userid is 0 (i.e. not logged in).

The latter (the db_class_ file) will show you what is required and what is optional as far as the dataman fields are concerned (find the $validfields declaration for each class in that file).

Unless you have a zillion forums, I'd suggest creating the new ones by hand and just building a simple array by hand to do your forumid translation. That way you don't have to learn the forum datamanager as well.

-- hugh

[LanceTrahan]

Thank you very much for the insight!

This sounds like just what I was looking for. I did notice while poking around that if the userid for a post is 0 it will just show the post name with no link to a profile (in essence, a guest post)

As for the creating forums by hand, that will be easy enough to make by hand and just fill in the blanks from there.

Thanks again!

[cheesegrits]

No problem. Post again if you have any problems.

Just in case you haven't found it already, there's a semi-helpful explanation of how to drive datamanagers here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/data_managers

... and the generic auto-generated API docs are here:

http://members.vbulletin.com/api/

I'd advise doing this as an AdminCP "maintenance task". Plenty of example code to borrow for building the scaffolding for batched tasks like this.

-- hugh

[LanceTrahan]

Thanks, I finally have a moment to go through this. I'll let you know how it goes.