User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-452-20121129225441/@comment-452-20121130013515

Yeah, I understand the difficulties and realise it's virtually impossible to do it automatically.

Even just moving the old page verbatim and allow new-style comments to the old page would be better than not being able to reply at all - the old content would still be locked, but at least it would be visible and accessible through the new forum system, and new comments could be left.

Manually, my only option currently would be to post each comment myself and include the original signatures on each - time consuming, but would be less so if import were possible, using a bot would probably work as well.
 * Assuming that sigs were used, a bot could be used to determine where each comment ended in that way, rather than basing it on revisions. Of course, with varying sigs, particularly sigs which don't link to a userpage, it would be easy for a bot to merge two comments.
 * Even more likely than nonstandard sig is nonstandard indenting, so I wouldn't even attempt to use them as a delimiter when parsing.

Possible new methods to do that would include:
 * Local admins having the ability to define a username for a thread, this could be open to abuse - but you can still have the history show the actual thread creator, rather than the displayed username - I think this is something that may be possible, as User:Wikia does exactly the same thing with welcome messages - the Wall message says I posted it, but the history says User:Wikia created it.


 * A slightly less time consuming way to do it manually would rely on importing manually defined threads - but there's a problem there as I'm fairly certain that the "thread/parent" relationship is completely inaccessible, although I haven't yet examined exactly how the "move thread" function functions.

Personally, I'd prefer the option of importing and exporting entire threads, so that importing manually defined threads would be possible. (The history would still record that the importer imported the thread) But I don't really expect that to become available, since if it was, it probably wouldn't be used by very many people, as it would be time consuming and complicated for most.

I hope you find these suggestions useful, even if you don't use them.