Hacker News Reader

A one click button to export from phpBB and vBulletin would be amazing.

We do have a fully documented import and export format, however, we're not prioritizing conversion at this time because we believe there's too much technical and social friction to wholesale forum change.

And it's early, very early in our beta!

Mostly we expect early Discourse adopters to be of the "starting from scratch" kind.

I definitely need an importer to be able to use Discourse. I have been looking for a way to get away from PHPBB for years, and would happily move to Discourse, but if I can't bring my content and user posts with me, my community won't follow, either.

Unfortunately, this is one of the major general problems with forums. You just don't have an option. Import of old forums might be one of the bigger impacts you could make.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com