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@bothwell
Yeah, big DBs are an issue. I like the way Wordpress does its imports / exports - that works using XML but it breaks the imports up into chunks so if something fails halfway through, it's not a problem, it can just resume, going back to the self-healing thing. Uploading an actual DB has the potential to be a bit of a nightmare - what if your forum was running on MSSQL instead? And what about all the other weird data that people have, like VB arcade and so on. Realistically you'd want to go through the tables on the end client's server and just send the relevant data to microcosm instead of microcosm taking everything and then picking through it itself, so you'd end up with a bunch of connectors for different BBS packages, just like a normal forum, in a way people are used to.
I do like the idea of a canonical, semantic format for BBSes, though. It would have been impossible five years ago, even in spite of microformats becoming more fashionable, but now that Open Graph has really taken off there's a real sense that all data can potentially be standardised and manipulated across the whole net in a really cool way.