Google Groups Mailing List Import Notes

Meta Elastic
1

Following our maintenance window earlier this week, we now have all of the old mailing list archives imported into Discourse available as normal topics. Many thanks to @eviltrout for his fantastic work on getting the disparate data converted just right so that we have an accurate history of several years of emails available under one roof. :confetti_ball:

There are a few things to note following the import:

  • User ownership of topics and replies is based upon email address. If you have interacted with Google Groups in the past with an email that is not the email you use with Discourse, you can still claim ownership of these posts by gaining control of the old email address in Discourse. You can do this by using the "Forgot password" feature with the email address, or signing in with Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. if one of those services presents the email address that matches the posts in question.
  • If needed, we can alternatively migrate those posts to be "owned" by another user manually; let us know if this is the case. (Note this is a fairly manual process, so unless there is a pressing reason for this, leaving old posts under the old user may be fine for the archives)

If you have any questions about the import or notice something that needs fixing, please feel free to bring it up.

2

Can we assign multiple email addresses to our current account so these posts will be "owned" by us automatically? I don't want multiple accounts with Discourse and have used multiple email accounts in the past.

3

Unfortunately I don't think that's possible, as Discourse is (basically) using email addresses as primary keys for users, so associating more than one email with a user isn't possible (the Discourse team can correct me if I'm wrong here.)

If you want to associate the imported posts with your primary Discourse user, the best approach would probably be to have us migrate it for you on the backend. Technically you could do this using the aforementioned "change ownership" feature in the UI, but... that's tedious for any sufficient number of posts.

In testing this out, we anticipated some duplicates needing to be fixed, so we'd be happy to do this for those who need it.

4

Thanks Tyler, I will message you.