Sorry for the relative quiet the past few days. I have taken it upon myself to try to help Jen McCreight port all her Disqus comments back into a format WordPress can work with, so that she can complete her migration and be one of our happy neighbors. The problem is relatively convoluted, though. First, it appears that my Disqus export file is not in any format that any existing WordPress plugins know how to deal with. Second, it appears that attempting to sync the Disqus database against a temporary WordPress install just caused Disqus to break blaghag.com, deciding to no longer show any comments on any existing threads.
The problem now involves mapping what Disqus thought each post name would be, with the actual post name on the WordPress database. I’ve gotten most of the problems sorted out, with a few exceptions that simply don’t appear anywhere on the database in any form. There’s a distinct possibility that when I start importing these comments, it’s going to rearrange some of them onto similarly named posts. I’m doing my best to avoid that sort of situation, but I only have so much foresight. At least I’m down to about 300 unidentified comments, which isn’t bad at all.
The next thing I have to do is figure out a way to map child comments to their parents and preserve threading. What… a… mess. Disqus has basically made sure that once you’re on their service, you’re not leaving. Fair warning.
So, my personal non-work time will be mostly spent ignoring the world and hacking away at this XML file until I can import it into WordPress and save the roughly 37,000 comments that have been saved only on Disqus and never to Jen’s Blogger database. And I’m mostly doing this because Disqus should have made this easy by using the generic WXR format, but they haven’t, they went with their own schema. I’m out to prove this kind of import can be done. It’s personal now.
Share your Disqus horror stories, or WordPress database-hacking stories here. Who knows? Maybe you’ll have a solution I haven’t thought of.