[Phillip Burger]

My request / idea for this topic comes from being involved in WordPress.com and WordPress.org forums. As people in these forum may know, there is a lot of confusion about where to input topics when people need help with WordPress. Because of this confusion, it leads to many Topics (basically support tickets) in the wrong forums.

An example of this is when people post to the WordPress.com forums for a question about a self-hosted WordPress site. This takes the staff and volunteers working on WordPress.com away from supporting that system and instead causes a need to support this other question and most of the support is educating the difference in .com and .org. Once those replies go the tickets, some people opening the topics are still not sure what to do – and telling them “go to the other forum” might be confusing, and at the least will cause duplicate work.

So, the idea: a feature in bbPress that allows a forum (in this example, the WordPress.org forum) staff to “pull” a topic from another forum (WordPress.com forum) and get the data setup as a topic in the forum where it makes sense.

Ideally, this would pull over the threaded history, somehow note the users in the discussion as users of the old forum or the new forum (maybe call user: username[wordpress.org] vs username), and tags as needed…and then allow the discussion to continue on the new forum while noting the move and closing the ticket on the old forum.

There is a problem that the user opening the topic needs to exist – and the user in WordPress.com may only exist in that system, so one option would be that part of pulling the topic over would do an automated user creation behind the scenes on the “new forum” if a simple search did not find the user to assign the topic to in the new forum.

I also think that in order to do some kind of migration of topic from the UI side (just past in a URL and basically “scrape” the data) would be nice but for the better administration the data would be pulled with API calls and this could be done by URL and some kind of nonce/code that only a staff members who has high access on both forums would know/generate. They log in to the old forum, go to the Topic they want to copy and click something to enable the copy – this would give them the nonce/code. They go to the new forum and note where they are pulling from URL, the nonce/code and the user they want to assign the topic to in the new forum.

This is a long winded explanation, but I think similar to other situations where a company or organization could have a legitimate need for multiple forums platforms (instead of just splitting by forum in one site) and a method to essentially “move a topic to the right forum” could have a nice benefit – not to mention the simplification of support for the WordPress community.

I would love feedback and if this is something useful, it would be great to know what the next steps are to follow through.

(this is a similar idea to what is in https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/copyduplicate-topic-into-another-forum/ but it seems different so I did not just put a reply there)

[Robin W]

this can already be done in

dashboard>topics>edit topic>topic attributes>forum

[Phillip Burger]

@robin-w – I may need to mess around some more to see, but based on what I described, does that feature allow “moving a topic” from WordPress.com forum to WordPress.org forum? Or just from one forum to another on the same domain?

[Robin W]

no it wouldn’t allow you to move a topic between sites

[Phillip Burger]

Understood. I did bring this topic up pretty specifically to the multiple WordPress forum sites (.org and .com) and it is hard to say if that is a very limited use case worth any effort (maybe just a plugin and not some core update to bbPress would be better) but there may be organizations that run different forum sites where the information is similar, but not worth co-mingling into the same site completely – and the ability to copy / move topics could be useful I believe.