I am changing up the layout of our forum. The current layout is split into 6 different forums based on topic. I want to move all the old threads in these forums to an Archive group/forum and change the forum titles to our core regions. Is there a way i can do this without going through each individual thread and moving it?
Thanks!
I would STRONGLY recommend testing this thoroughly before making any changes:
If you go to the forum and open the admin/pencil menu, you can go to Manage Forum > Merge Forum to move ALL posts from one forum into another:
I didn't find any documentation on this, but this is the description from the menu:
Schedules a background job to merge all threads and replies from the current forum to another forum. Depending on the number of threads to merge, this job may run for a significant amount of time. While the merge is running, each thread is converted individually and redirects are created to the new forum location. Once all threads and replies are merged successfully, the current forum will be deleted.
As you're testing, also pay attention to redirects, as you want to make sure the links to the old URLs don't die off if someone tries to access an old post (I've had issues with this in the past).
This is an "all or nothing" option, as you can't selectively move certain posts one way and others another. If you wanted to do that, you'd want to go with a data migration script, as Wilfried Rijsemus (3sides) mentioned. If you're dropping all 6 forums into one single "archive," though, it seems like this wouldn't be much of an issue.
Also, keep in mind you'll need to work with and extensively communicate with your members to make sure they're correctly following the new forums, as I don't believe the membership/follow will carry over to the new forums.
