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Transport forums

You might find the original forum platform could not cope with the development of your business. So it was the time to transport your forum topics and their sessions to a new platform. If the original forum platform doesn't provide APIs to export contents or its database structure is too complicated to export required contents from database directly, MetaSeeker toolkits can save you from manually copying the topics and discussion sessions one by one.


Figure 1(Enlarge)

There are the following components:

  • Original forum platform: It is assumed that the original forum platform did not provide APIs for exporting contents and its database structure was too complicated to export required contents from database directly. If the assumption fails, it is better to use the APIs or the database export tools than MetaSeeker toolkits.
  • MetaSeeker toolkits: A cloud is depicted because MetaSeeker toolkits are always deployed distributedly in a network. The MetaSeeker toolkits extract forum topics and their sessions one by one. Different from ordinary Web spiders, MetaSeeker toolkits store the extraction results in XML files with semantic structures instead of HTML documents.
  • Forum feeder: The component retrieves extraction results from MetaSeeker's server, reformats the contents and feeds them into the new forum platform. The components in this type are from 3rd parties. We can recommend the most suitable one for a specific solution based upon successful cases. There are the following approaches to feed contents:
    1. to call APIs provided by the new forum platform;
    2. to import the transformed contents into new platform's database;
    3. to simulate user's GUI operations of initiating new topics or discussing them.
    The first two approaches are more effective for the open-source or open-API platforms. For example, approach 2 can be taken to transport forums to Discuz platform.
  • New forum platform: is the sink for the transportion.

MetaSeeker Cook Book#Scenario 1 states how to extract topics and their discussion sessions from a forum, which is a good reference.