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UPDATE: Added support for importing tracked forums and topics.

I'm in the process of converting my forums from Community Server to AspNetForum. While CS may support every single feature under the sun, its very big and unwieldly to work with. The more recent 2007 and 2008 versions are better, but still behemoth. I just want to drop in one simple forum with a couple subgroups, not host a million forums and blogs on my site. For this, AspNetForum fits the bill exactly.

There's no official importer for Community Server to AspNetForum, so I wrote my own. It turns out to be fairly simple. Just a SQL script will do it. Here are the steps the script goes through:

  1. Import the ASP.NET application, user, and membership tables
  2. Create the AspNetForum single sign-on linkages in its ForumUsers table
  3. Import the groups, forums, topics, and messages

I packaged all this up into a SQL script that handles the whole process end to end. Just edit it to point to your database and forums and it will do the rest. It assumes the following:

  • You've created and set up an AspNetForum database
  • You've created the ASP.NET user and membership tables in the AspNetForum database
  • The AspNetForum and ASP.NET user and membership tables are new and empty

This script will import everything with the same ID values from Community Server, making mapping or redirecting easy.

To use the script in SQL Management Studio, do the following steps:

  1. Open the script (Import.sql) and connect it to your AspNetForum database
  2. Execute a search and replace operation that replaces "CSDatabaseName" with the name of your Community Server database
  3. Set the @applicationId variable to the ApplicationId matching your Community Server instance in the aspnet_Applications table in your CS database
  4. Set the @groupId variable to the GroupId of the forum group to import from the cs_Groups table
  5. Execute the script

Download the script and get importing! – CommunityServer2AspNetForumsImport.zip