The best way to do it is to just edit the posts and attach the files while doing so; as such, it's really a job that needs a moderator/administrator (or the original poster of the message) to do it.

Any posts with this issue have a note added at the end of them saying "X attachments could not be loaded" (or something along those lines); if you find any such posts, make a note of the URL. I'm going to put up a dedicated topic for this, once the ones that *did* make it finish uploading - currently there's about 400 remaining, but this isn't requiring any effort; it's just a LOT of data to upload so it's taking quite some time.

Aye, I figured it wasn't a big enough deal to be sorting out right now. I'm just making it a note of it so it's noted, really.

Best of luck with the rest of what needs to be done.

Basically, the remaining todos are:
1) Sort posts into their correct boards, in cases where there's now a more suitable board that didn't exist before (eg: NeoLemmix and SuperLemmini now have dedicated boards, there's a "Other Projects" board which things like large level packs could go in).
2) Fix up missing attachments that didn't transfer over properly - the majority of them did, but there are some that didn't.
3) Link remaining posts to the users.
4) Fix the post counts.

1 and 2 can be done by any of the staff members, including board-specific moderators for posts on their boards, or (if the posts have been linked to the user already) by the original poster of the messages themself. 3 and 4 are tasks that require admins - most likely myself, though it's not entirely impossible for ccexplore or geoo to do it (but 3 in particular would be difficult as server access for them hasn't been set up yet; only Admin panel access and database access has been).

This sounds like it could be fun.

What sort of parameters are you thinking of for the contests?

It'd probably be relatively simple things - I don't want to overcomplicate them! I haven't got any specific ideas, but the concept of official contests in general is just a thought to try and, a) encourage more people to get into level designing, b) perhaps bring out some new ideas, and c) possibly to encourage some more content for the newer engines (ie: NeoLemmix and SuperLemmini) since they don't have much yet.

Looking forward to this pack! Though I might wait until it's finished before playing...

Okay, the majority of posts have been linked to accounts. If there are any that aren't that you'd like to get linked, send me a PM with:

1) A link to a post that hasn't been linked to the account - you don't need to link me to *every* post, as long as they all have the same username with them
2) If it's not yours, then a link to the profile (or the *exact* username) of the person who's post it is

I'll give it a while for these to be sorted out before fixing the post counts.

ALSO: I won't be able to link posts from the older forums that are under a generic name such as "Guest", unless there are only a VERY small number of them. If they were posted as a guest but with an identifiable username (eg: "Bob (not logged in)"), then I can.

It does NOT matter if you weren't yet registered at the time of the transfer. Your posts can still be transferred once you've made an account.



There's also a few more-specific boards than there were before, and as such, some topics may need to be moved. I've temporarily allowed users to move their own posts to different boards. Please *don't* use the option to create the topic announcing the move.



Finally, if there are any posts with missing attachments, then:
> If it gives a 404 error when you try to download it, just try again in a few hours. Some of them are still uploading.
> If it actually has a message saying "attachments are missing", then they'll need to be manually downloaded and re-added from the old site. I plan to dig out all of these and fix them myself, but in the meantime, if they're *your* posts, you can edit them and reupload the attachments.

In the latter case, to avoid having to fix up the code (changing from HTML to BBCode), just wrap the post with [html][/html] tags.

I've finished coding (but not yet fully testing) the code to import posts from this site - attachments included of course!

It's in testing at the moment. Due to the need to parse HTML it's a lot slower than the LemmingsWelt and IsaMedia codes were; whereas those generally took about 3 minutes each to run, the first "dry" (ie: not actually uploading, just generating output files) code of this is currently about 10 minutes into running and only up to the Level Designing board's second page. Still, it seems to work now, based on smaller test runs (only importing a small selection of posts instead of the entire forum). If the output from this looks decent, I'll do a small import test run of actually importing a few topics to the new board (which will of course be cleared after being confirmed as working, to avoid duplicating them when the full import is done).

One thing I haven't implemented yet is the timestamp. In order to keep this simple, I'll need to get a new download of the site with a couple of timestamp-related settings changed. So, at some point, the timestamps on this board are going to have to be changed to "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS" format, without the special display of "Today" and "Yesterday". This will have to be done on two occasions, both of which a full download of the site (which takes a couple of hours) will have to be run:

a) At some point to run a test run *with* timestamps.
b) When we do the actual final import.

My apologies if this is inconvenient to anyone, though it shouldn't be a major issue.

Note that about the timestamp thing; if you have a custom timestamp format enabled in your account settings, you don't have to change this. It's just how *guests* view it that must be changed (which also gets applied as the default for anyone who hasn't set a custom one).



I haven't done anything on the importing PMs yet. If you make backups as ccexplore described, you've at least got them in some form; I can sort out doing something with this later. The way I see it, although it is something I want to deal with eventually, it's a less critical issue than the posts themself and thus I'll deal with that once posts are fully handled.



EDIT: It appears the import posts code is successful on a "dry" test run. I'm going to now do a proper test with just 2 or 3 topics (including some attachments).

EDIT: The results are somewhat successful. A few tweaks and it should work better... Specifically, no problems at all with the post's content - it imported fine - but attachments are somewhat faulty.

EDIT: Complete success has now been acheived. The only remaining todo is to add code for handling the timestamp.



EDIT: The date format has been changed as mentioned above, in order to do the first test run. I will change it back when finished; but if you want to display dates normally in the meantime, go to Profile > Account Settings > Look and Layout, and enter this in the Time Format input box:

%B %d, %Y, %I:%M:%S %p

Alright, may not be able to do too much over the next couple of days (though I'll be able to do more later today), but at the moment, I've got it able to parse all the board links, page links within a board, and links to each topic (though the last one is untested as of yet). All that's not even attempted yet is finally parsing the posts themself after grabbing all the links.

After that, PMs is my next target.

A couple of heads ups (both in reference to the new forum):
- At some point I'll have to disable posting for about 20 minutes or so to do a test run of importing posts from the old forums.
- When doing the real import, I'll have to at least disable attachments for a short time.