As designed Conversions

[thunderclap82]

This past weekend we migrate from MyBB to Xenforo with little problem and the response from our community has been overwhelmingly positive. One area of concern, however, is Conversations. The import system imported everything fine, including messages people thought they had deleted. For the more privacy prone user this has raised an issue because they want to know why something they thought was deleted wasn't.

How does Xenforo import private messages to conversations? Does it import from a deleted folder, or does it see who was involved in the original PM's and create a new conversation assuming one person never deleted the private message chain? (Hopefully that makes sense.)

 

[Paul B]

Data data is retrieved from the database during the import process and each importer is different.

I'm not familiar with the MyBB schema or how deleted conversations should be handled, so I've moved this to the importer bugs forum so the developers can confirm if that's expected.

 

[Chris D]

Due to the way that private messages are stored in MyBB this is actually somewhat expected.

To be clear, you can't "delete" a message in MyBB. The delete function merely moves your own copy of the message to the trash can. It's essentially just moved into a different folder.

The closest equivalent we would have in XF is the ability to leave a conversation but, again, because of the way the messages are stored (each user has their own copy of each message) this is difficult to replicate and if we applied this logic still not entirely expected given that leaving a conversation in XF essentially removes your copy of the message, which may be unexpected to those who are used to seeing the message in their other folder with no way of getting it back.

While I sympathise with the privacy comments, given that MyBB never deletes the message from the database as far as I can tell, and you merely move your own copy of the message to a different folder and it is still visible, I'm not totally sure it's a valid concern. It likely means they believed the message to be gone but it never actually was and was still visible by the other recipients.

So, all in all, we're not planning any changes here. But you may wish to direct these users towards leaving the conversation in XF for a similar effect to what was in MyBB. But it should be noted that this still only affects their own view of the conversation, doesn't actually delete the conversation (unless the other person leaves it too) and the data is still there.