XF 1.5 Discourse forum data to import?

Good evening,

I'm working to try and get our new forum set up and am close to the point of needing to bring over data from the current site using Discourse for the forum software. I know your importer does not support this (or I can find no mention, if it does). The problem I am having is that I can't seem to find any other forum packages that will work with it for a double import, either.

Now, I'm no linux or server guru, but I've taken a couple college courses on server admin recently and have the basics plus some on starting a process to manually pull the data from one database and insert it into the other.

I think my largest question here is, what am I watching for in what may not be obvious? I already have my full user base in a CSV file, and rearranging that is a simple enough matter to make those fields match what I find in the Xen database...now if I match field for field in order to insert the whole thing into the proper spot ..what else am I missing, to find out the hard way? Are there other tables with connected data for instance, that isn't obvious to consider on this?

I know what I'm attempting is a few country miles past any fair support request, and I'm on my own. I'm fine with that, and have no real choice in the end here for both message content and user base. I'm just looking for best advice and information to at least minimize the error half of 'trial and error' in getting this accomplished.

* A further note. Discourse uses Postgre. So the question here is as simple as it gets for basically saying I'll have everything in CSV files, and again, I love excel, in terms of mass modification or bulk reorganization to the whole set of data in any way needed to format it to match Xen...but just going with the CSV's as the base starting point may as well be assumed in how that gets imported manually to function and not break it.

Thanks to any or all who can help?


XenForo developer
Staff member
Essentially this is likely to be the biggest challenge (though there will be others depending on what you try to do). There are 5 tables that have to be populated per user. There are 2 fields at least that need to be random strings per user. (Tables are xf_user, xf_user_profile, xf_user_option, xf_user_privacy, and xf_user_authenticate.)

You might benefit from exporting the data in those 5 tables, registering a user, and then re-exporting the data of those tables so you can see what has changed exactly (and to potentially give you some guidance of what's in the columns).
That is exactly the kind of help I was hoping to find as I start this effort. What can I do, but back up the site like its a religion in itself and, as you note, experiment a bit and reverse engineer things until it works?

Thanks for the quick reply though, and I'm hoping to start working with attempts on this tomorrow. Here is hoping it goes well.


XenForo developer
Staff member
I'd recommend doing this on a test or local install. Maybe make a backup point right before you start messing with the data to ease the restoration process. If you're only doing users, you really only need to restore the tables you're changing, so that should make the whole restoration process quicker.