I'm in the process of moving my forum to Kunena. As I was using a forum, where there is no way to export my posts from the old forum. Right now I am copying post from that forum and moving them to kunena manually. My problem is that I want to be able to manually change the date to the date that the post was orignially made. when I copy post it shows the date that I am copying and posting. Is there some way that I can edit the post date on the copied posts that I am transferring to Kunena?

Hello,

From what forum component do you migrate ?
How do you proceed to migrate?

I am moving from a yuku forum.

G'day, julies. I looked at Yuku about 18 months ago as a way of carrying on a web-based community that I had managed for many years through [the now defunct] MSN Groups. Mostly because of localisation issues, and because I felt that Yuku's terms of use were too restrictive for me, I abandoned Yuku from consideration. When I say that I felt Yuku's terms of use were too restrictive, you need to understand that the data and the mechanisms by which you access it from the web-based forum interface are not owned by you; they are actually owned by Yuku.

It may be possible to achieve some kind of automated migration, if Yuku is prepared to release the data to you in some portable form, but I doubt it. This is a standard situation faced anyone who uses free, three-mouseclicks-and-you've-made-a-community websites, like Yuku ... or Facebook.

So now you're left with two options. One is to leave the old data behind at Yuku and start afresh. Believe me when I tell you this, it's the best option! It's not only easier, but it gives your users the chance to settle into nice clean surroundings without the baggage from the past.

The second option is to continue, as you have been doing, painstakingly copying messages across one-by-one. As you have found, this causes other problems, not the least is the timestamping one (more on this in a moment). But the bigger problem is how do you migrate your users? Suppose you manage to move a message across from your old site to the new one. How do you assign the ownership of those messages to the users who wrote them in the first place?

To address your timestamp issue, you can change the time when a message was posted if you know anything about MySQL and about MySQL time values. Kunena's messages are stored in the database table jos_fb_messages; the message timestamp is held in the time column. The value in the time column stored as Unix time (for example, 1267243400 = 27-Feb-2010 04:03:20 UTC or "Zulu" time). This gets rather complicated: you need something to convert your dates and times into UTC time - UTC translates approximately the same as Greenwich Mean Time - and then you need to convert that into Unix time. Are you about ready to give up? I sure as heck am!

How many messages did you intend to move?

Thanks for your response. I was prepared to go for it until you got to the time thing. Totally lost me there not to mention I know nothing about Mysql. I hadn't even thought about the message authors. Of course some have rejoined but some have not. There weren't very many active posters anyway. Thanks again !