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Importing comments from proprietary system?
We're trying to move to ID from a proprietary commenting system (very rudimentary, form-mail that is then added to the page by hand), and have all the data we need (name, time posted, message, etc). I was hoping we could get these old comments into the ID system WITH the proper timestamp posted, but it's not working as planned. Here's how I hoped to get it done:
1) Set up dummy comments in new dummy ID blog.
2) Export XML, which contains these new dummy comments.
3) Use the exported XML as a guide to edit & populate with old comments from our proprietary system, maintaining the existing structure of the XML (just filling in the data).
4) Import edited XML back into ID, which effectively brings the old comments into our new ID system.
Two things:
1) Is this even theoretically possible, assuming we keep the strict structure of the XML doc?
2) Is importing XML disabled? All of the docs and promotional material I'm seeing for ID claims you can import without a problem, but I'm not seeing that option at all in the Blog Tools section (just Export, Reinstall, and Uninstall).
Any other ways we could go about doing this? I see that the timestamp for each comment isn't publicly surfaced, so we could, theoretically, enter all of the existing comments manually....which would work in a way because they would still sort correctly by date so long as we enter them in the right order....but I'd like to avoid that and pre-date them all if possible.
Thanks!
1) Set up dummy comments in new dummy ID blog.
2) Export XML, which contains these new dummy comments.
3) Use the exported XML as a guide to edit & populate with old comments from our proprietary system, maintaining the existing structure of the XML (just filling in the data).
4) Import edited XML back into ID, which effectively brings the old comments into our new ID system.
Two things:
1) Is this even theoretically possible, assuming we keep the strict structure of the XML doc?
2) Is importing XML disabled? All of the docs and promotional material I'm seeing for ID claims you can import without a problem, but I'm not seeing that option at all in the Blog Tools section (just Export, Reinstall, and Uninstall).
Any other ways we could go about doing this? I see that the timestamp for each comment isn't publicly surfaced, so we could, theoretically, enter all of the existing comments manually....which would work in a way because they would still sort correctly by date so long as we enter them in the right order....but I'd like to avoid that and pre-date them all if possible.
Thanks!
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Inappropriate?Any idea about how many comments we're talking about?
The XML dump is more to allow you to move your comments to a different, proprietary comment system's format if you choose to do so. We don't currently offer an import from that format.
I'd suggest you email us at support@intensedebate.com. There are a couple different ways we can do this depending on how many comments there are and a few other factors.
Thanks. -
Inappropriate?Hi Jon,
Well, there are currently 24 separate story pages, any my understanding is that we'd need to set up a separate blog for each of the stories, since the comments are supposed to pertain to each individual story. On the low end, some have less than a dozen (maybe a handful), but on the high end there's quite a few dozen. Maybe ~500 in total?
Please let me know if there's anything we can do. I will get in touch with support as well, and reference this posting.
Thanks so much! -
Inappropriate?Jon,
I have a similar kind of question. We're currently running a company blog written by ourselves. We're busy replacing the comment system with IntenseDebate but need to import the comments from our proprietary system. We could make an export of our comments and rewrite it to be the same as the XML Comments export provided by IntenseDebate. But at this point there seems to be no way of importing the XML again.
Would be great if you could help us out. We're a web company and for some clients we're really interested in replacing the comment system with IntenseDebate. -
Inappropriate?Hi Ruben,
I don't believe I ever did get a response back when I emailed their support, so as far as I know the issue still remains. We've since decided to pursue a different commenting system (which has just moved to a Wordpress XML format for their own comments, so they should work great moving to and from WordPress), so I never followed-up or heard anything more.
Good luck. -
Inappropriate?Hi MediaStorm,
Thanks for your reply. Could it be any use for me? We're not doing anything with Wordpress and not planning to. We need a separate commenting system we can rely on to implement for major companies. We don't mind paying. -
Inappropriate?Well, I was hoping to refrain from posting it here because it seems a bit wrong being that this is IntenseDebate's forum....but we've decided to go with one of their competitors of sorts: Disqus.
We like what we saw with ID, but Disqus seems to be the only one out there that can do what we need: import XML-formatted comments (in WordPress's comment XML format) into their system. We'd still have to do it all by hand, but (if I understand it correctly -- we haven't dug *too* deep into it just yet) at least it's an open format that we can take with use if we decide to leave, both importing and exporting.
I know this doesn't really help you if you guys already decided on IntenseDebate, but we seem to have exhausted our options there so needed to move on.
Good luck.
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