Before copying over the forum database, we ran a resequencing process that synced up the timestamps with the forum post sort order.

We needed to do this because the new forum uses timestamp to order the posts. On the current forum if you update a post, that updates the timestamp -- which isn't a problem because the current forum does not use timestamp for sort order.

But the updated timestamps throw forum threads out of order over on the new forum. The problem is pretty extensive ... fully 25% of the old forum threads had out-of-sequence timestamps.

So we ran an automated process that resorted the timestamps to match sort order on the old forum. That means when moved to the new forum, the posts will still be in the same order and not jumbled.

Once the timestamp fix was done, we copied the old forum to a database dump and sent that to the new forum developers to use for loading.

Here's the conversion process, step-by-step

1. Run the full timestamp resequence on the current forum to get the timestamp order to match the Drupal post order. done
2. Lock the current forum to read only status. You can still read everything, just no new posts. done
3. Copy the full old forum database and send it to the developers for loading. done
4. Set the new forum as read only with a forum lock password to keep folks out until it’s ready. done
5. Blow away the new forum data and do a fresh reload with the copy of the old forum data. done
6. Do review, once good, change recent posts on here to the new forum (expecting sometime Monday). done

The conversion is still underway …. It might be another day yet. Still looks good, though.