Migrating from 5y Private FB Group -> XF

[DevOops]

We have a private Facebook forum that has been running for many years. There's lots of good content burried in it that we would like to utilize when moving over to XF.
- Has anyone done this successfully? If so, then how?

I was thinking one could replicate FB threads. If XF admin could login as each significant user to recreate the history of their comments and threads - possible?
Alterantively, we could ask each moderator / significant contributor to log into XF and try to replicate their replies and threads from the FB group.
Thoughts?
Thanks!

 

[AWS]

You can download a copy of your user data. That includes all posts and replies to posts. Download is a json file. Once downloaded you should be able to load it into the database.

 

[DevOops]

You can download a copy of your user data. That includes all posts and replies to posts. Download is a json file. Once downloaded you should be able to load it into the database.

And then edit that as admin to be in the right sub-forums, etc? How would the usernames get matched up?

 

[Miri]

Try asking @MySiteGuy if he can do it.

 

[briansol]

The data FB supplies is not very good, at least in my experience with a PAGES export. Not sure you'll be able to classify everything easily without a ton of manual actions.

I would probably create an 'archive' forum/category and throw it all into 1 page there and lock it to new activity. That way, the history is there and new activity can actually populate in the open forums.

 

[MySiteGuy]

It won't be easy or cheap, if done correctly.

FB is not going to give you an entire group's data, even if you're the manager. It will give your data.
There are paid crawlers available that can convert a group to SQL. I can't vouch for any of them since I haven't used any. Or a crawler could be written but that's likely to cost more, and might be buggier since it's not an existing product.

Once it's in SQL format, I could write an importer.

You're still going to have all the users not having email addresses in their equivalent Xenforo account. If I did this, I'd load each with a randomized fake email, because Xenforo needs something in the email field. You'd have manually update user accounts with their emails as they request them, plus they'd have to prove who they are.

I'm 3 to 4 weeks out on any new custom importer work.