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@Velocio
It's not wholly surprising that they don't provide a tidy export format, LFGSS for example is almost 10GB of MySQL database. Can you imagine how inefficient that would be as a single JSON or XML file? And the likelihood for errors during import would be quite high.
Once we're ticking over nicely, I want to make sure that we accommodate export in some tidy way to make sure you're not locked in. It would be great to help define a standard format for forum export (for the common data).
The reason I like the thought of a common format is for data portability... what if every forum software could export in this 1 format? And what if every forum software could import this 1 format?
Instead of every provider writing their own bespoke mapping thing, each provider would just write 1 export and 1 import.
I think there's a lot to be gained by helping people move their forum and to try out different software. Not everything is a one-size-fits-all... so site admins should be able to try other things with reduced pain.
And yup, happy to let you on the private beta when we get there.
Not perfectly sure how we'll be doing import yet... whether we let you upload a database (but that requires us supporting every version of MySQL and Lord knows what flags and options), or whether we provide you with a script that you'd run on your server and that would call our API (most likely).
Would be good to have your feedback too though.
My only view on import is that it needs to be self-healing. That if something goes wrong it should be able to resume from the place at which it failed and once you've fixed whatever the issue is, that it picks up from that point.