[Arlo]

I have a few things I’d like to do, and not sure if it’s possible:

I’ve migrated a phpBB forum over to bbPress. What I want to do is twofold:

1. Lock or close a given forum so it’s read only. Basically to call this the “archive of the old forum”

2. Delete the bulk of users that migrated with phpBB while maintaining the usernames on the original posts. If I just delete users, all those old posts become “anonymous”.

Thanks…

Steve

[fel64]

2. I doubt this is possible without majorly changing the table structure. You’d basically have to add another column to the topics and the posts table with just the plaintext name of the original author, but also keep the normal author column for maintenance, post ownership etc. Is it really necessary?

[chrishajer]

This is very interesting to me. How about these ideas?

For the close a forum, I don’t know how you would do that. There’s nothing I know of in the bb_forums table that marks it open or closed. The best I think you could do is mark the topics closed. To do that with SQL, you could do something like

UPDATE bb_topics

SET topic_open=0

WHERE topic_id IN

(your comma separated list of topic_ids)

You could drop the WHERE part if you wanted to mark all existing topics as closed. Before you do anything with SQL though, be sure you have a backup of the data.

I can see why you want to take a snapshot of the old forums and mark them “archived/old” but, I would assume if you are moving things from phpBB to bbPress that your forum structure is going to be similar, so closing the forums to new topics wouldn’t make sense anyway.

Another option is to create a new forum called “phpBB Archive” or something then move all the topics and posts over to that “archive” forum, then create your forum hierarchy again in bbPress like it was in phpBB (i.e. World News, World Labs, Support, etc.)

For the users, why not just change all the passwords? That would make the usernames still valid, so no one else could re-register as an existing name, no one could log in with the old name, and all the existing posts would still be attributed to the original poster.

Just my thoughts: maybe they’ll be useful. Good questions though…

[Arlo]

You both ask very reasonable questions

Basically, my forum is such that people tend to sign up just to ask 1 question and disappear. So over the years it has amassed about 700 users with 1-2 posts, tops.

My current setup is pretty much a mirror of the old forum (it’s at my site at /bbpress if you want to see the design in progress), which can of course work fine, but being the anal type I was thinking of starting this forum with a “clean slate”, as it were. Maybe 2-3 users would be returning and bear the burden of re-registering.

But I guess I’ll leave it be. As new posts come in the old ones will “flush” off the front page anyway. Thanks for the insights.