All of the forum tables begin with the prefix ‘sf’ so they are easy to identify and all should be moved.

However – and this is the problem area – forum users and posts are intrinsically linked to the WordPress Users and Usermeta tables so you really need to move these two tables as well. This is OK if the target domain has the same database WP table prefix as the source and if there are no users already defined in the target.

Assuming then that all of the data can be successfully exported from the source and imported into the target the only thing to then look at will be the forum option records – basically work through all of the forum admin panels to ensure all is well. any references to links/urls relating to the source domain will need to be manually changed but there are not that many of those.

And if it doesn’t have the same prefix and there are already users in there…is there a way to do it manually?  I don’t have a lot of users in what I’m moving but, if possible, there’s maybe 2000 posts that I hate to lose simply because it looks better to have activity than to be a brand new forum with nothing in it.

Well the bottom line is that

• SP has an ‘sfmembers’ table where there will be a row that corresponds to each user in the WP ‘users’ table. If that equivalent row is not found in the WP Users table then I am a little unsure what will happen but I believe it will treat the user as a guest poster.
• Every post made in SP by a registered user has their ID recorded with the post record. The same applies as above in that this record also expects both a row in ‘sfmembers’ and a row in ‘users’ to be present. Again – if not it reverts to treat the post as coming from an unregistered user or guest.
  You will understand from this that the ID’s in ‘sfmembers’, ‘sfposts’ and ‘users’ need to be the same of course.

I mentioned the table prefix simply because this is used in some rows (WP uses it) to hold access information per user in the ‘usermeta’ table. Thus if the table prefix had been the same for both domains it would have been possible to also import the whole users/usermeta tables successfully. If the prefix is different and the target tables already have some data in them then this is not going to be possible.

one last question.  is it possible for an admin to go in and assign a post to a user as the author of that post?  so if they all come in as guest posts…the ones that matter most, could I manually change the author from guest to a specific member?  if so, how would i do this?

you can do it via phpmyadmin or your db tool… or in the forum, you can use the forum tools to reassign a post – but it would have to be post by post…

you can do it via phpmyadmin or your db tool… or in the forum, you can use the forum tools to reassign a post – but it would have to be post by post…