Users for Archived Posts

[Sim]

I have been working on a little program that can go through the archived posts we imported from the old WebBoard forum a while back and update the userids of those posts so that they match the users on the new forum.

At the moment, all archived posts appear under a userid of "WebBoard", which means that you cannot search for archived posts by a particular user.

What I propose is to map old userids (there may be more than one for each person) to the current userids.

Pros:

• Can search for archived posts by current username (even if multiple usernames were used on WebBoard)
• Post counts for updates users will increase to include all of those posts from WebBoard as well
• It will be really cool

Cons:

• It will only work for people who have registered on the new forum (but if they register in the future, I can go back and add in their archived posts then). This means that some people such as TW (for example) will not be updated yet, until she registers on the new forum.
• Post counts for updated users will increase to include all of those posts from WebBoard as well - this means that there will be some people with very large numbers of posts - this is not necessarily a bad thing, but there is something to be said for "starting anew"
• It will take a while to do everyone
• I will only be able to include people who I can be sure are really the same - many people have changed their usernames on the new forum. If their email address stays the same, then it's easy, but a change of email address can make it tricky. This may mean that some people miss out.
• I cannot realistically do the original forum posts as well - since I don't have the same kind of data available from there. It would be only the WebBoard posts that I would be updating
• I will need to create a record of which user on the new forum maps to which usernames on the WebBoard forum

What does everyone think ?

 

[Rolf Latham]

Sounds like a lot of work for you ?

ta

rolf

 

[Sim]

Yeah, but it's fun !

 

[bundy1964]

Originally posted by Sim
[*]Post counts for updated users will increase to include all of those posts from WebBoard as well - this means that there will be some people with very large numbers of posts - this is not necessarily a bad thing, but there is something to be said for "starting anew"

I thought you had gw's post count carried over?

I was just a lurker on the old forum so I didn't have a user name there.

bundy

 

[Mike]

I'm for it, Sim, if you can spare the time. On the issue of user names I wonder whether we should consider restricting new user IDs to minimum of 4 characters so that the search engine can pull up all the posts for any user. As it stands many users have 2 or 3 letters in their name and cannot be searched because of the restriction to words of 4 characters or more. Is it possible to configure the registration process to accept only User IDs of 4 characters or more?

Regards, Mike

 

[Sim]

Actually Mike, if you use the "Search By User Name" option on the search page, you can search for any user, no matter how short their name is. This is a simple table lookup in the database, with no special indexes required, so it's easy to do.

This is one of the reasons I want to get the users right in the archived posts, because it is much easier to search for users by username than it is to search the whole post using the regular search feature which has a 4 letter minimum.

 

[geoffw]

Re: Re: Users for Archived Posts

Originally posted by bundy1964
I thought you had gw's post count carried over?

Hehehe.

Actually, I did not contribute a whole lot in the old forum.

 

[Mr Ed]

Sim,

If you don't mind doing the work, I've given you my vote.

Ed.

 

[Kevmeister]

If you are only going to achieve a partial solution then the solution may in fact actually be worse, or it could leave you open to having to "re-run" the updates in the future.

For example, let's say 50% of the contributors to the old forum are not on the new forum. You can only convert the ones on the new forum, I'm not even sure how you intend to match them up (email makes most sense). So you'll have a bunch of posts that will still say "Webboard".

Let's say someone else "signs up" for this new forum, and they used to be a contributor to the old forum - are you going to re-run the conversion to find them and update their old posts?

This new person (who has just signed up) might well see the old archived messages with other people's names correctly beside their posts, but their posts don't have their name besides them.

User's searching will then have to try two means to find something - they'll try the search-by-name function first, then the generic search.

I would be more tempted to create additional dummy user accounts for each old contributor, if you cannot match them up, so the conversion happens once.

Hopefully, then, if someone from the old forums tried to create an account on the new forum, if their email is already registered they might get told something like "There is already an account with that user-name".

 

[XBenX]

Sim,

If you can be bothered go for it.

 

[Sim]

Originally posted by Kevmeister
If you are only going to achieve a partial solution then the solution may in fact actually be worse, or it could leave you open to having to "re-run" the updates in the future.

Not so much a partial solution as a partial conversion. We will get the benefits of those that can be converted now, with additional benefits coming as others are converted in the future. Some conversion is better than no conversion.

Originally posted by Kevmeister
I'm not even sure how you intend to match them up (email makes most sense).

The first run will be using email addresses - since that is the easiest. From then on, to cater for users who have changed addresses since using the old forum, I will need to create mappings from the new users to each of their old usernames (there may be several !).

Originally posted by Kevmeister
Let's say someone else "signs up" for this new forum, and they used to be a contributor to the old forum - are you going to re-run the conversion to find them and update their old posts?

The conversion will be done on a user by user basis, so as I get new information to add in to the mappings, I can easily run the updates just for that user. Doesn't mean doing the whole thing again.

Originally posted by Kevmeister
This new person (who has just signed up) might well see the old archived messages with other people's names correctly beside their posts, but their posts don't have their name besides them.

You get that.

Originally posted by Kevmeister
User's searching will then have to try two means to find something - they'll try the search-by-name function first, then the generic search.

Yup, which is exactly what they have to do now, search-by-name only ever finds posts from the new forum, and to find anything in the archives you need to do a generic search.

Originally posted by Kevmeister
I would be more tempted to create additional dummy user accounts for each old contributor, if you cannot match them up, so the conversion happens once.

Nope - actually more difficult this way, as there are more users to track ! As I said, conversion will not be a "big bang" strategy, will be modular and repeatable, so is not really relevant anyway.

Originally posted by Kevmeister
Hopefully, then, if someone from the old forums tried to create an account on the new forum, if their email is already registered they might get told something like "There is already an account with that user-name".

Which will cause all sorts of problems and confusion - which is exactly the reason I did not attempt to migrate users across from the old forum in the first place. I don't want to be dealing with continual requests for help from people who are having problems signing on.

 

[Sim]

Re: Re: Re: Users for Archived Posts

Originally posted by geoffw
Actually, I did not contribute a whole lot in the old forum.

Which would mean that you have the most to "lose" if I did this - you would lose your position at the top of the post table !

But I'm sure with your continued contribution you would climb your way back up there quickly enough geoff !

 

[geoffw]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Users for Archived Posts

Originally posted by Sim
Which would mean that you have the most to "lose" if I did this - you would lose your position at the top of the post table !

Which would mean that people who really have contributed well over a long term will have their contributions recognised into this new forum.

(And you will see a lot more addicted posters)

 

[XBenX]

haha - i didnt realise there was a post count competition - you cant count on more meaningless posts like this one from me

 

[Sim]

Originally posted by XBenX
haha - i didnt realise there was a post count competition - you cant count on more meaningless posts like this one from me

There isn't a competition XBenX ! In fact, we have done things like resetting users post count to zero as a result of them getting too caught up in trying to increase their post count with meaningless posts.

I'm not saying don't respond with a witty comment or something - just don't go overboard.

 

[XBenX]

Sorry Sim, I thought the post would fall into the witty comment or something catagory, it was just a joke

I wasnt really advocating a competition, I was just amused by the use of win/lose

 

[Sim]

Well XBenX, we have successfully clocked up several more posts between us, how long do you think we can keep this banter going before someone cottons on to our plan ?

 

[watto]

not much longer........

cheers
watto

 

[Sunstone]

Dear Ben,

As Sim knows............

Quality not quantity, tempered with enthusiasm.

Cheers,

Sunstone.

 

[Bill.L]

Sim

you seem committed, so go for it. You have my vote.
But I would'nt try just for another post.
bye