Gossamer Forum
Home : Products : Gossamer Forum : Discussion :

Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus

Quote Reply
Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus
Thought I would relate my experience getting Gossamer Forums up and going. Purchased it on Friday and was experimenting with layouts all weekend long. Had a shell up and running very quickly with my site's general look and feel integrated. That turned out to be very easy given the template design of Gossamer. Some moderate to significant problems were fixed over the holiday weekend by Gossamer staff (how's that for service).

The biggest challenge was to bring over my old forum. When I first installed a message board on my web site, I did not know if it would be viable or not. So, I went cheap and was using the freeware version of Discus (www.discusware.com).

This worked fine until the site and my users outgrew it. No user accounts, no e-mail functionality, and no delimited file format. The entire board was stored in a series of flat HTML documents (tables) and most critical to migrating to Gossamer - it was a linear system model not a threaded one.

Say it with me, "getting text data out of formated html is not fun". It looked so bad that I considered just writing off the 3,000+ posts from the old board. In stepped my much smarter programmer who wrote a very slick dhtml DOM (document object model) script.

All I had to do was wrap the script around the html tables (all 138 of them) and open the document in IE. The script processed through the html DOM pulling out the text data, then using ADO it logged into the SQL server and appended the posts into the appropriate tables while also establishing the linkage to the view history and updating the forum counts etc.. - all ran from within the IE browser.

Call me one very impressed and happy camper!

Launched the forum live to the world this morning and am spending my afternoon dealing with problems that only can be discovered by users of varying skill levels.

I am really looking forward to the continued development of this platform and bugging all of you with my questions.

-Very pleased customer (send all endorsement monies to me in Euros please)


Last edited by:

heavybombers: Jan 2, 2002, 3:17 PM
Quote Reply
Re: [heavybombers] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
Thats one huge forum you've got there Cool
Quote Reply
Re: [RedRum] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
It's a little scary for new visitors I'm sure. Under the old system you only saw the major categories and then navigated to the section you were interested in.

Blown out like this it seems enormous but just imagine it without nested categories.

I hope to be able to replicate configurable collapsed forums for the guest user view. Right now I have a several "The validation link doesn't work" messages and other users who can't find out where they sign up for new accounts at. This would all be so much easier without users.
Quote Reply
Re: [heavybombers] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
getting text data out of formated html is not fun


Adrian
Quote Reply
Re: [heavybombers] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
Hm. Who wrote you the program to extract the posts and submit them to your SQL database? Maybe you could convince her or him to submit this to GT - it could be an useful addition for others?

- wil
Quote Reply
Re: [Wil] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
My favorite kind of programmer wrote it, one who's related and can't charge me for his services <G>. Don't know if anybody can use it or would want to, but here it is:

p.s. after a quick consult the programmer declares "..there a couple of things that could be polished up a bit.. the deviation from UTC is hardcoded in the date calc.. and it doesn't account for daylight savings... I missed declaring a couple of variables."


Last edited by:

heavybombers: Jan 3, 2002, 10:28 AM
Quote Reply
Re: [heavybombers] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
Well I tried to delete my post (no joy) then I tried to delete the attachment and upload a new *.txt attachment instead of a *.htm attachment. That wouldn't take, so here it is again.


Well that's got to be a bug, I uploaded a *.txt file, the post says it's a *.txt file but it still downloads the original *.htm file. And I can't delete posts immediately after I post them. Get this instead: Home: Permission Denied

Oops! You are not authorized to view that page.

Reason: The edit/delete time for the post has expired

Last edited by:

heavybombers: Jan 3, 2002, 10:33 AM
Quote Reply
Re: [heavybombers] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
clicked on the attachment for the fun of it and got a blank page ... 1 ..Crazy

so I viewed the source and saw ....
Code:
Const FORUM_ID = EDIT

'---- CursorTypeEnum Values ----
Const adOpenForwardOnly = 0
Const adOpenKeyset = 1
Const adOpenDynamic = 2
Const adOpenStatic = 3

'---- LockTypeEnum Values ----
Const adLockReadOnly = 1
Const adLockPessimistic = 2
Const adLockOptimistic = 3
Const adLockBatchOptimistic = 4

sub window_onload()

more to it but you get the idea ... 2... Crazy

openoffice + gimp + sketch ... Smile
Quote Reply
Re: [heavybombers] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
Wow. Never seen VBScript before :-) Looks kinda cool. Thanks for sharing.

- wil
Quote Reply
Re: [Wil] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
Except it only works in IE Crazy

You can make some cool things with it though. Its like a mini vb


Last edited by:

RedRum: Jan 4, 2002, 2:32 AM
Quote Reply
Re: [Wil] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
It's all greek to me! HTML and graphics (Ultradev and Photoshop), are the areas I restrict my actions too. If it gets any more complicated than "insert code here" I have to raise my hand.

What I found really cool was the action all done in the browser, had no idea it could *do* that kind of stuff.
Quote Reply
Re: [HeavyBombers] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
I had some trouble... I go to the link af the attached file and appears me a blank page. So I go to the source code and copy all the data and paste it into a text editor. Then I save it and run with my browser... It appears a blank page! So what extension must the saved file have? I must insert the html strings like <html></html>?
Note that I use IE 5 for Mac. Please HELP!
Thank you very much
Max
The one with Mac OS X Server 10.4 :)
Quote Reply
Re: [maxpico] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
if you got a G4 ... I truly recommend up grading to OSX !
life is so beautiful now Laugh

openoffice + gimp + sketch ... Smile
Quote Reply
Re: [QooQ] Migration to Gossamer Forum from Discus In reply to
Yeah I got a G4 and OS X but this doesn't change the malfunctionement of the plug... Anyone can tell me how can I use it?
Thanks
Max
The one with Mac OS X Server 10.4 :)