MSN to Vb

[Viks]

I know this will a far shot but i still wanna put this question to you.

Is it possible to import threads from MSN boards (msn groups) to vB board?

[Ianomed]

Possible: yes
Easy: no

It would involve a great deal of screen scrubbing, filtering through all of the HTML pages, extracting details and converting them for vB. Stranger things have been done though, I know people have used a similar process to move from proboards.com hosted forums.

You would also have to issue new passwords to people, as they wouldn't come across. If you have photos/documents uploaded these would either have to be made attachments to threads, or converted to an addon file/photo gallery.

Unless someone has written this already I think you'll have better luck making this a paid request, it's not something I believe many would consider something to write for fun

There's always the even less interesting idea of importing everything by hand, in which case posts would be owned by the copy/pasting member, or restarting and keeping the MSN group as a legacy board.

Maybe someone else has a better idea?

[Viks]

thanx for ur thots ianomed.

what i have in mind is simply archieving the threads on msn group to a vB forum.

Like called it "archieve" where the first post is a single msn thread. the users on vB can then add or discuss it further.

btw, any idea how much wud someone charge for a mod like that!!

[Ianomed]

So you do not mean for the users to be imported and posts to be attached to their username as before. In this case it could be as simple as copy/pasting each thread's content across to a new thread, not requiring any mod to be written.

As such the cost could be less depending on how many threads there are. I really can't say, it largely depends on what someone would charge for what's basically data entry type work.

If you're talking a very large MSN group with lots of posts and lots of members, then it may be cheaper to have a script written after all, because once written it would arguably import faster, and allow for more detail to be preserved.