I have a few million archived posts currently read only on a pre-2007 wwwboard. It is have been requested that these be included in our current production XF 2.2 instance so they are searchable by keyword (though not by user).
These posts don't have real usernames frequently because wwwboard had no such concept initially, people selected a handle each time they posted. But if I don't get a "handle" match in the xf_user, I would still like to show the name given in the threads and posts without creating a real user for those posts (the handle entry was far too abused by users, except a few who stuck by the same name which eventually became their username).
Is it destructive (or would it even work), to import the thread in in such a way that xf_thread.last_post_username be set to the textual name taken from the wwwboard post even though the user_id would be set to the anonymous user. Likewise for the post record, xf_post.user_id would be mostly the anonymous user but the xf_post.username again would be set to the textual only username given in the wwwboard post.
I'm sure this won't work correctly, but I'm trying to determine if it's minor or a catastrophic failure to have these usernames reference a non-existent username.
These posts don't have real usernames frequently because wwwboard had no such concept initially, people selected a handle each time they posted. But if I don't get a "handle" match in the xf_user, I would still like to show the name given in the threads and posts without creating a real user for those posts (the handle entry was far too abused by users, except a few who stuck by the same name which eventually became their username).
Is it destructive (or would it even work), to import the thread in in such a way that xf_thread.last_post_username be set to the textual name taken from the wwwboard post even though the user_id would be set to the anonymous user. Likewise for the post record, xf_post.user_id would be mostly the anonymous user but the xf_post.username again would be set to the textual only username given in the wwwboard post.
I'm sure this won't work correctly, but I'm trying to determine if it's minor or a catastrophic failure to have these usernames reference a non-existent username.
