Thanks Crispy, I knew you guys would be on it
The posts were imported from a WebWizGuide v.7.91 forum. It was
surprisingly easy and aside from the datatype problem it worked like a
charm. The main steps were :
1) Created a special "Archive" forum on my new site for all the imported posts
2) Created a special "Conversion" user to which I attached all the imported posts
3) Wrote an .aspx script that extracted all the posts and threads from
the old forum DB and fed them to the PostAdd() function of the
DotNetNuke.Modules.Forum.PostController class.
The biggest/trickiest issues were :
1) I had to re-adjust the paths to the smileys and pictures (users
could upload images in the old forum) so the images weren't broken. I
did a scan/replace right before I fed the post to PostAdd (this is
actually why I ran the import twice, I forgot about the paths the first
time around).
2) I had to make sure that the first post in each thread was fed to the
PostAdd() function with a Parent Id of "0" so it knew to start a new
thread on the new forum.
3) The PostAdd() function does not allow you to specify the date of the
post so all the posts are imported with the current system date. I had
to make sure I feed the posts to PostAdd() in the correct order in
which they were entered on the old folrum so the posts are at least in
the right order when users view the imported posts on the new forum.
However, you can specify the "Pinned Date". I therefore used the old
forums's post date as the pinned date, with the idea that I could set
the new forum's post date = pinned date after the import.
4) As I mentioned before, I didn't import the users, but as the users
re-register on the new site over time, I could then write another
script that would be ran periodically to attempt to attach the imported
posts to the their proper users on the new site where possible, instead
of the "Conversion" user.