Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-20302766-20130407124958/@comment-188432-20130407133632

Oh you mean user talk pages. I thought you meant stuff from namespace 1—things like tardis:talk:Doctor Who. It's still not a problem, legally. Everything, even stuff on user talk pages, is subject to use elsewhere, so long as the importing wiki gives a list of users equivalent to that which exists on the original wiki and some sort of link back to the place of origin.

That said, though, I wouldn't want my talk page to be imported from one wiki in the Wikia network to another one. It simply wouldn't be relevant to the new wiki. I'd want to start out with a clean slate.

Although you don't have to, legally, it would probably be wise for you to first ask the users in question whether they want their old talk page imported to bakerstreet. I wouldn't just grab them all from A to Z.

However, once you've decided who's going to get imported, this is what I'd do. I'd briefly turn off MessageWall, then I'd make the import, then I'd turn back on MessageWall. Although I've never done it before, and you might want to test with one page first, I see no reason why this wouldn't just create an automatic archive for you. If your wiki has regular user talk pages, and then you change to MessageWall, the user talk page gets archived instantly, and you end up with a little link to the archive.

But that brings up another thought. Since what you're ending up with is a link anyway, why go through the bother of an import. Just have people add something like this somewhere on their page: Click here for archives

You could even put that into a template and pretty it up so that it looks like a shiny button if you want.