Support Forum

First, kudos to the developers.  This simple plugin is almost as complex as wordpress.

My wife has a site I maintain with a SP forum and due to an ISP hack she lost 30 or so posts since previous good backup.  All is working well now and she asked me to upload the lost topics and posts from her moderation email folder where the text content is archived.

I plan to do this manually and use the handy "Edit Timestamp" option feature to put in the correct date for the record.

However what I and many others would like is just a tiny bit more functionality for admin when manually adding in lost posts and to this end I would very much like to have a feature like the "Edit Timestamp" that will let me enter the number of the user to associate the new topic/post to.  This would avoid me having to go and edit the rows in the database (which seems to work fine when I tried it) or alternately load the pages after the post is saved and manually reasign it with the toolbox but it would be nice to do it at the time of adding in the post.

I am even prepared to test a code hack if it can be easily done where we change the purpose of the 'seconds' input field in the "Edit Timestamp" option for the admin to be the post user ID.  I would accept a trial that would not have any input checking as I would remove it after this job is done (a limit of 59 users would almost cover the user base of 75 she has).  It could be added as an extra field before Month but having looked at the code I don't know where all I would need to do that, I found the Edit Timestamp implemented in at least 3 places plus CSS and not that confident a PHP coder myself.

Having read 100+ posts here that are very informative I have found that the sort order of posts is determined by post-id and not the date field.  Not a serious problem and also I could manually delete the few new posts and then add them in last with new post-ids and they will be back in sequence. A script like this to resequence posts according to date would also be useful for this purpose on small sites.

Thanks for all your hard work.

Wow, super fast response as you forum admins are known for.

(but now that I have your ear)

I had a thought, how much work would it be to make a 'debug' form for the admin back office  interface that is just a un-styled form that has all the fields that are sent to the db when a regular posting is made populated with some defaults and with open boxes for subject, body, userID, date, forum id, topic number,  that just calls the regular function to send the stuff on it's way. (could this be a (separate or sub-) plugin ? perhaps you could make a beta version and then just stop supporting it making thosewho makes regular use of it pick up the work, less experienced developers would be more inclined to work on a smaller system that only does one little thing)

I could try hack my posts into SQL script queries to upload with PHPadmin if it was just a bit easier or I remembered anything about perl or made use of reg-exps more often AND I could generate the escaped strings text that have all the slashes in place, that is why an option of actually using WP to load the post is so appealling, basically a slightly more user friendly way of entering (editing not required) data into the sfposts and sftopics tables with cut and paste.
Placing it into the back end would obviously allow you to acommodate for the upload of a CSV file that fills in the blanks and generates the post calls line by line. Perhaps one form for new topic and one for posts.  The admin would be responsible for maintaining data integrity if there is already topics on the system and the topic numbers have changed, at least folks like me could work on an csv file in safety and the worst that happens is we have posts linked to wrong topics.

I read your replies to the import issues and you probably have a canned response because you have said you dont have time and are happy for others to implement it so often,  but I think there is some fear about how difficult the task is so others hold back in offering services (lack of PHP skill or knowledge of the posting -> db table process), however I think you developers are holding back because you can see the size of the project and I don't blame you.

However you could reasonably easily come to a compromise that benefits all and uses the available skills to best advantage, you just make an opening that will allow others to connect using hard work, we will do the testing and suffer the excel munging of data and such to clean up a csv file.  Make an interface that is EASY for you to make and let others fit to it.  Automatic conversion from one forum db to another is almost a fools errand because of the continuous version changes on both sides and huge number of combinations.  However if there was "an association of forum developers" :-)  that came up with a minimum spec for import then people would write converters from SQL script files to feed into the csv portal of most any software.  I am obviously unaware of just how complex the requirements of making the data nice would be, or if even the excaped/packed formats of data stored in the databases would be compatible from other forums but at least plain text could be imported semi automatically.

As for the renumbering, I think you are looking for a perfect solution again in trying to renumber the posts, I meant to imply that the sript should do what I would do manually after entering the lost posts, that is clone the oldest topic/post that is out of date sequence with a new ID that would put it into sequence. Flag it (so as not to display but not deleted yet) so as to not loose any links until process completes.  Loop through the table until all un-flagged posts have ID's in date order.  Then delete the old posts that were flagged.  The only cost is a bit of processor time and lost post-IDs from those rows that were out of sequence.  I was not suggesting that you change IDs or implement a sort in the SQL database on unique key fields by moving the data around, just sacrifice the ID keys.

Unless of course there is stuff I don't know about post ids like linking to blog entries and such but I'm not using such functionality and people who are importing data from a alternate system probably do not have a potential for linking to wordpress blog entries anyway.  Remember it does not have to be perfect as long as you just mention 'beta' next to the tool and "use at own risk" :-)

I suppose you can say I am a bit presumptious in offering advice on my second post to these forums but I have enjoyed setting up and monitoring the 3 forums for my wife for many months and will add more.  I may never have to use these tools I propose as I plan to be keeping better backups but even if it is only a days worth of posts that are lost to a server crash then making manual entry practical instead of just possible would be nice.