UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? IMPORTING: Creating Thousands of Accounts (ARGH!)

Hope this is the right place to discuss this...there used to be a board devoted to migration issues....

OK. Here's the nightmare of my life. We are about to import 300,000 or so postings (from matt wright's wwwboard, very tweaked) into UBBthreads. We don't want them all to show up as "unregistered user". So we'll have to preset a whole LOT of accounts.

We presently allow (but don't force) users to provide an email address along with their nametag. So our thought is this: create accounts for anyone with an email address (picking out, first, nametags like "Dave" which are likely non-unique), and email them to inform them of their account. Then delete account of anyone whose notification email bounces back.

we'll find a way, when importing, to insert the nametag somewhere into the message field, so even if someone doesn't get a preconfigured account, he still gets credit for his posting (any suggestions for where to put it?)


Problems:
1. really great users who choose not to post email addresses get locked out of this scheme

2. awful vandals we've kicked out (and whose postings haven't been entirely expunged or who've returned under alias) will get invited back.

3. people mistype their nametags and email addresses sometimes (yes, most of those emails will bounce, but not all....and what about the nametags?)

4. I'm not crazy about going through a list of like 40,000 nametags to manually pick out non-unique ones ("Bob", "Sue", etc).

5. OTHER problems I've not fully grokking but can smell coming down the pike!

Any suggestions here?

One thought is that since we get 1000 postings/day, this stuff will be quickly buried, anyway. So maybe we should skip it and make the backlog generic after all (so long as, again, their nametag shows up somewhere in the body). Hate to lose that data. And then we have the problem of vandals "stealing" identities.

thoughts?

thanks


JIM

Hmm well more of a general concept about what you could do to save the complexities of accomplishing what you outlined...

- Create a (or a series of) general archive forum(s) to import all these posts into... if you did this before your user account work, you could have the poster be anonymous but match up to the original poster's name... right?

Is there any way to sort your user list by post total? If you could do that, you could then import those users with e-mail accounts, who have posted more than x # of messages. If they didn't have an e-mail address, you could take a week or two to post a notice on your current forum, for those users to contact you to attach an address to their account for the conversion.

If you don't have post totals, throw that whole thing out the window.

To clarify: I'm not worried about "where do all those postings go?"...we're building a spider that will take care of this and import messages to the correct boards. My big issue is with user account registration.


"If you don't have post totals, throw that whole thing out the window."

sigh, consider it tossed!

(but, of course, the suggestion may be useful for someone reading along)

thanks,

JIM

Plus, it would be increasingly difficult due to posters changing their email address, and their posting names... you could end up registering someone with 5 accounts under one email address, or something..

"you could end up registering someone with 5 accounts under one email address, or something.. "


so they'll let us know and we'll zap. Plus we'll zap any accounts that remain unused after a month or so (we'll mention in the email notification that they must come and change their password "or else"...)

true. I guess maybe it would work.. just would take a lot of work though