[douglerner]

I currently have an older, proprietary social network that’s been running for years, with about 10,000 members.

I can export from that site in any custom format needed.

Is there a format I can create which will import users with the following info intact?

– User name
– Email address
– Date joined (very important!)
– Friends
– Groups (I would also have to recreate the groups)
– Personal avatar
– Profile info (I would make sure the profile fields match)

Thanks!

doug

p.s. Is there a way of receiving notification of replies from these support forums?

[Roger Coathup]

@douglerner —

There are some off the shelf plugins for import from CSV file, but I’ve heard varying reports on whether they work successfully.

In the cases were we’ve needed it, we built our own custom routines to bulk import users from CSV file into BuddyPress. It could certainly be done for your data set.

re: your ps. No, there’s no way of receiving notifications. The ‘support forums’ would be far more useful if they were built on traditional forum software.

[douglerner]

Roger, thanks.

By the by, I did get an email notification telling me of your reply, which is why I am back.

But I find these forums horrendously slow, and also hard to navigate. Plus it keeps on thinking I’m logged out when I’m not. Is that all buddypress’s problem, or a bbpress issue?

Thanks,

doug

[Roger Coathup]

Doug — the notification will be because I explicitly @mention ‘d you in the reply.

Yes, the behaviour of these forums is not a good advert for BuddyPress — although some of that is down to the coding of this site, rather than a BuddyPress specific problem.

Recently, a plugin version of bbPress was released, which significantly improved support for forums on a BuddyPress based site. That gives proper notifications, and the sort of features you’d expect from regular forums. Unfortunately, the alternative ‘group based forums’ as used on this site, really don’t deliver a good experience.