Merging bfmods and ServersideModding.com databases

[fo0k]

Ladies and Gents,

I am looking once again at the process of merging bfmods.com and serversidemodding.com sites/databases together.
I am considering giving the task to the phpbb staff whom I have contacted and have said they will do it for a fairly modest fee of $100.

The advantage of getting them to do it is their obvious technical familiarity and ability to do it cleanly, but also they will integrate all previous posts from matching members to the new site so everything becomes linked up again. likewise any original ssm members without accounts at bfmods would simply be able to login with their old account details at bfmods.com

It's all these messy bits (pm's, accounts etc that make an attempt by me to do the task a major headache.)

The fact is that if we merge then I want it to be seamless, structured and useful.. not just a case of dragging in content.

over 50 bots crawl this site day in, day out and so to have them index the vast amount of information from serversidemodding into bfmods would easily create the most significant battlefield 1942 modding resource in TEH WURLD!

So.. what I would ask is that you think hard about any additional implications/advantages/disadvantages etc of doing this. Any problems you could see popping up .. and your general thoughts on it all.

Donations are not requested but I'm certainly not as rich as I'd like to be so would not be refused in a hurry
If everyone gave 33c we'd have it covered!
the main thing is the feedback so please please post your thoughts.

As ever, bfmods will remain a non commercial website purely to act as the hub of (mostly) 1942 modding for all who love the game.

Thanks!

[Apache Thunder]

What will the forum look like appearance wise once this merger takes place? I'm certainly all for this.

Only issues I see are users who had decided to use a different username then or changed their username after coming to BFMods.

[fo0k]

What will the forum look like appearance wise once this merger takes place? I'm certainly all for this.

Well this is exactly what I need your input on so please input away!

edit: well I was thinking you mean the forum structure appearance..? if you mean visually.. like the theme/banner etc then I was probably intending to leave that unchanged..? same looking site but with all the info together.

Only issues I see are users who had decided to use a different username then or changed their username after coming to BFMods.

Good point. I imagine this number of people is not too high? Any ballpark idea?

[Jeronimo]

You could send all 303 members of the new site a PM and ask them to send you the name (or even better: profile ID) of their old SSM account, if they had one. Then it should be easy for the merge guys to put this together, with some sort of 1:1 profile ID relation table.

Problem is... what do you do with old accounts if there's no new one connected to it? Who should appear as the one who wrote their posts?

[fo0k]

Well all old accounts would simply become live here.. so the original poster would own their posts still.. and we would have somewhere close to 2000 members i guess.

When merged, anyone with the same username would be merged together.. anyone who has changed their name but had an account on the old site could be matched up after (whenever really... moving the owner of a few posts will not be tricky)



of course the final merged site will sit in a testing ground for us to make sure its all working

[motoko]

(whenever really... moving the owner of a few posts will not be tricky)

Better hope he doesn't delete your account, guys!

[fo0k]

heheh.. like i said.. I'd run the new merged site in tandem for a while to make sure there's nothing missing

[Apache Thunder]

Is the IP information for the old accounts stored? Perhaps they can be linked together by IP? The new users likely still have the same IP as they had with the old accounts. Though I'm sure a few of them might have gotten new ISPs/IPs since then.

[tekk]

I have the same User/PW from the old site so hopefully thats a good thing, Diff ISP/IP of course

[Swaffy]

That's exactly what I was thinking about. Just link together the same IP addresses. Well, if that's possible. Also, I cannot think of any disadvantages to merging together the two.