[@robin-w Moderator 12 years, 7 months ago]

I imported from an access database (ditto conversion to sql) so know what you’re going through! see https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/documented-import-from-snitz-access-database/ for a blow by blow of how I did this and presume you’re already well into using custom importer https://codex.bbpress.org/import-forums/custom-import/

Now given that you’re going to re-register users, then we only need the topics to be assigned to a user which exists, which then when they re-register you can set up properly.

So for instance if you have a topic with the author name of “fred” – then you need a user fred to exist. This needs to be at ID level.

So in essence you’ll need to import

topic with author ID
User with same ID

Minimum info to create a user is (in theory – it may be less) ID, username, email and password.

In my case they mapped from a snitz access forum (via sql) as follows

MEMBER_ID _bbp_user_id
M_NAME user_login
M_PASSWORD _bbp_password
M_EMAIL user_email

So I would go about it this way.

What we need to end up with is a topics/replies table that has a author ID (number) against each topic/reply.
In a user table, we then need that same ID, together with name, password and email.

So first I’d go back to my lotus notes and see if topics has an author ID. If not we’ll need to create one (we’ll do that in a minute).

Then from the topics and replies lists create a set of autor names and (if it has them) ID’s

Create a user table (in my case in excel, but presume you’re familiar with creating in lotus notes) with the following headings

ID NAME PASSWORD EMAIL

If your topics/replies doesn’t have user ID’s then you just need to populate this table with unique ones, I’m pretty sure that you can just start with 1 and increment them – wordpress will assign new ID numbers as they come across starting with the next number that wordpress is not using.

For password, just put anything – and they can all be the same

Emails must be unique in theory, but don’t need to exist so abc@def.com is fine (you’ll be fixing these as they register, so doesn’t matter). But as you’re importing directly into the database, I reckon you could get away with them all being a single fictitious one. But if you have the skills, I’d create them as increments eg abc1@def.com, abc2@def.com just in case

so now you have a user table to import.

If you topics and replies don’t have author ID’s, then now go back to the topics and replies tables and run macro to populate a new column using name against the user table you’ve just created to populate with id.

Now we have topics with ID’s an da user table to import. Just check that column names match the importer, convert it all to sql, and off you go !