vanilla2discourse

A collection of scripts to help transfer a community from Vanilla to Discourse. May only be useful for me.

You'll want to set three environment variables:

• VANILLA_API—Acquire via https://YOUR_VANILLA_SITE/profile/tokens.
• DISCOURSE_API—Acquire via https://YOUR_DISCOURSE_SITE/admin/api/keys.
• DISCOURSE_USER

You'll also want at least one existing Vanilla site and one Discourse site you want move to. (Now some of these scripts aren't technically related to Vanilla at all and are just handy for adjusting Discourse configuration.)

tier_categories.rb

Vanilla allows any level of category/forum nesting. Discourse only allows one. That is to say, each Discourse category my have up to one parent and no category with children may have a parent. It's a dystopian (or utopian, depending on your point of view) grandparent-less existence. It's also a lot simpler.

The idea behind this script is to pick one level to be the top level and stuff all categories anywhere beneath that level to be direct children. So if in Vanilla you have:

• Top level!
  • Next level
    • Under leveled
      • Sublevel

Then in Discourse, you could set the main depth to be 2 and get:

• Top level!
• Next level
  • Under leveled
  • Sublevel

$ tier_categories.rb VANILLA_HOST DISCOURSE_HOST -t 2

flatten_cats.rb

This does the reverse of tier_categories.rb. It goes through all the Discourse categories that have parents and makes them top-level. This might be necessary if you, I don't know, screw up the previous script. (Not that I would know. 8-)

$ flatten_cats.rb DISCOURSE_HOST

alpha_cats.rb

I have a big list of schools that I need to organize. The logical first step is to use the alphabet, which is already a known sorting method. For the purposes of this script, I remove "University of " while sorting. This could be made general, but I'm gonna be lazy for now. (If this seems like a useful script for your Discourse instance, please let me know and I'll parameterize this script.)

$ alpha_cats.rb DISCOURSE_HOST

delete_cats.rb

The solution our forums had for the large number of schools is to alphabetize under categories named A through W and X-Y-Z. Those aren't real categories with discussions, but just organizing pseudo-categories. So I want to delete them. (Fun fact: the script was originally called kill_cats.rb, but that started to make flatten_cats.rb feel uncomfortable.)

$ delete_cats.rb DISCOURSE_HOST

transfer_avatars.rb

People online love their avatars. How you chose to represent yourself matters a great deal. Our import didn't bring over avatars from Vanilla, so I wrote this post-processing script. It ignores default avatars.

$ transfer_avatars.rb VANILLA_HOST DISCOURSE_HOST 

update_users.rb

This script transfers avatars and also a few other things. It makes moderators on Vanilla also moderators on Discourse. It also maps people to the appropriate trust level based on rank:

$ update_users.rb VANILLA_HOST DISCOURSE_HOST [-r ROLE_ID] [-u USER_COUNT]

show_warnings.rb

At the moment, moderators can't see a list of warnings they way they can suspensions. This script creates the most bare-boned report of a user's warnings. For obvious reason, this should only be shown to staff (moderators+admins). How many warnings and the title of those warnings shouldn't be broadcast to other users. The links themselves can be seen by staff and the user who has been warned. (And this API will fail unless the API key is authorized to get this data.)

$ show_warings.rb DISCOURSE_HOST USERNAME

To see the script in action, redirect the output to a file (> username.html) and open it in a browser ($ open username.html). I could use a lot more styling that I'm not planning on doing because I'm unqualified.

post_announcements.rb

When we import data all the posts are wiped out, which means I need to repost a few announcements and the banner. This should really be made more general. Also, making a post a banner isn't working at the moment.

$ post_announcements.rb DISCOURSE_HOST

upload_cats.rb

Once you have the categories to your liking on an instance of Discourse, you might want to copy them to a new instance. To do this, download the categories.json file from the existing site: https://DISCOURSE_HOST/categories.json.

$ upload_cats.rb DISCOURSE_HOST

update_settings.rb

This script updates random setting to the way I need them on my site. Probably not useful for you without edits. :-(

$ update_settings.rb DISCOURSE_HOST