Updating the Member List after Migration

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Peter Walker
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Updating the Member List after Migration

Post by Peter Walker »

During the migration of your archives and member list from YahooGroups and groups.io, the transfer of the members did not work perfectly and we are still working on correcting this. In this post, I am going to explain the problems and how we are working on fixing this.

As part of the process, our aim was to match the original posts with the respective members. The only references we had were the email addresses and the Yahoo-IDs. Unfortunately, there are many members who do not have a Yahoo-ID and others that changed their email address over the years. There are even some members who have had more than one email address registered at the same time with YahooGroups. We have seen some members with 5 or more different email addresses used over the years. On the forum, it makes sense to only have one username per person which means we have a massive task trying to identify all the email addresses, people have used over the years, and merging the accounts into one. 

We had two sources for the email addresses: the current member list from YahooGroups and the email addresses attached to the individual messages in the MBox files (from the official Yahoo Downloads). As we were in a hurry to release the forum in time for Easter, we mainly concentrated on using the email addresses from the original emails and that has left us with over 700 members with multiple accounts due to email changes and other members that never posted that were not assigned an account on the forum.

We are currently using a series of cross-references to try and identify all those accounts and rectify them. This has turned out to be a massive job as it is not easy to clearly identify each user's posts. We are comparing similar email addresses and similar usernames, but often it is a matter of reading the messages and looking for common styles like real names, websites, etc. being mentioned.

We have also discovered that a number of members that never posted, have not yet been added to the forum. They are relatively easy to identify as we just have to add the members that are missing in the MBox files. Again, this is an ongoing process.

As I want to offer this migration service to other groups, it is very important to learn from this process with your group so that we can get the process right next time without all this manual work.

How you can help!

Most members will still know which email addresses they have used over the years. If you have used more that one email address since joining AND you have been posting messages to the YahooGroup, please send an email to minutus@forums.group giving us your name and a list of all those emails you have used. That will help us to then identify and merge the posts from the various email accounts into one account with your latest email address (the one currently registered on YahooGroups) or the one you tell us to assign to your account.

The more people that help, the faster we can fix the problems with the membership list allowing you all to properly interact with the forum.

Thanks for helping us resolve these issues.

Before anyone asks who "us" is, it is mainly myself and the Polish programmer who created the code to migrate your YahooGroup to the forum.
 


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