Importing a Yahoogroup into Dolphin Forum

I have had a yahoogroup for about twelve years (moving from onegroup to egroups and then yahoogroups) so it's got a rich history and a LOT of material in the message archives.

I would like to import the entire threaded message archive into a new Dolphin forum on my site that shares the same name and archive setup.  I mean importing and using in Dolphin as a working forum, I do NOT mean setting up a feed or anything like that as the goal is to replace the yahoogroup with the new Dolphin setup which I have more control over but without losing the rich archive.

I have not found a mod that will let me do this nor any discussions or blog posts here on Unity.

So . . . anyone have a clue on how to do this?

Ideally, the new forum would preserve dates, threads, and user associations (although, the last can be switched to some sort of alias system if need be).

I will be sending invites to previous yahoogroup users to join the new system and ideally would like them to be able to take over their legacy posts, but will sacrifice that if it's not doable.

Anyone have a clue or the ability to do this at a reasonable rate?

It would be extremely kool if this could be made into a mod or package that could be applied to other groups as well (I have more than one yahoogroup I'd like to eventually import).  I am referring to yahoogroups a person owns, not to pirate importing someone else's material group into one's system.

- Brian

I found a discussion on converting yahoogroups to phpbb at http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=819725 which might make sense to some folks here . . . it's all the same arcane gibberish to me as I'v no real clue . . . thus posting here in hopes someone's already done this and has a handle on how to guide or do it or someone's got a handle on the tools in a way that they can fix it up as needed.

Here's hoping.

- Brian

I have a saved my pre-existing forum archive from the yahoogroup into an mdb file (microsoft access compatible format using the PG Offline reader for yahoogroups which will download the archives of any yahoogroup one belongs to) via an offline reader and would like it imported into the forum for one of my Dolphin 7 groups. If possible, I would like threads saved along with username IDs and the like (even though these would be legacy unless the current user joins the new forum location) with as much flexibility to keep things active as possible as per my original post.

Any way to do this?

The original forum was in yahoogroups but I want to move it into my dolphin community for more flexibility on resources as well as much more control over the beastie (it's my forum and so I want it on my server). By having it in a group with the same subject name, it also adds some nice resources such as video sharing that the former group never had.

Ideally, I would like some flexibility in terms of allowing folks from yahoogroups to move into the new implementation with their email/user names intact. However, if that's not possible, at least having the archives in the new group is very worthwhile for my purposes.

Anyone done anything like this before? I was really hoping for a mod or the like that lets me just plug and play import into the new forum but if that's not possible, then some guidance would be helpful . . . or a clue or few . . . or . . . if it's something within someone's experience that can be done at a fairly reasonable rate, I'd be very interested in hearing more.

There are currently close to 15,500 messages in the archive (which is still in use, albeit it is a low traffic group but has been around for a very long time) so something that is more automated would be ideal rather than copy paste edit which would be way too tedious and time consuming. Ideally, I would want the actual port to be done fairly quickly as I will stop one archive and open the other within as short a span as I can to minimize downtime.

Obviously, having a tool for this would be ideal as then one could port other groups one owns (I have several that I might eventually wish to port).

In any case, I hope someone could let me know if the forum import is something they're familiar with (or if there's a simple tool or way to do it already available).

- Brian