Migration from other platforms
If you have an existing community running a platform other than Discourse, we think it’s a good time to upgrade!
Since Fall of 2016, Literate Computing has helped dozens of communities migrate to Discourse from inferior forums (since my entire living comes from Discourse, I believe that all other forums are inferior!).
Can you migrate my forum?
If you can get a dump of your forum’s database and an archive of the uploaded files, the answer is almost certainly “yes.” There is list of importers that are available here on Github. If you do not see yours listed there, a new one will have to be written. I typically charge $1000-2500 to write a new importer for a forum of 100K posts, with additional fees for larger databases. If an importer already exists for your legacy forum, I typically charge $500-2000 to import to Discourse for a small to moderate-sized forum. Some variables include how much data you have, how many times I need to run the importer to resolve problems that emerge, and how critical down time is.
That sounds expensive! Can I do it myself or get it for free?
Sure! Lots of people do. Search on meta for “#how-to forumName” or see this guide. If you are not a do-it-yourselfer, you might pay for a year of Business hosting from Discourse.org ($3600 at time of this writing) and they will do it for you in addition to hosting your site for a year! If you are getting hosting from them, you should definitely check with them first to see if they will cover your migration. If your migration is especially large or especially complicated, it might still be cheaper to have us do the work.
Another solution is to use crowdfunding to have your community pay for the move. It worked for BlenderArtists and some other groups Literate Computing has served.
Get Started Now
For a full estimate, we need the information requested on the form below and a copy of your database and your attachments. You can use this link to get it to our engineers (worry not: massive.io is designed to handle terrabytes of data and costs just $0.25/GB). Typically we need a full database dump as well as any uploads, attachments, avatars, other files you want included in the migration.