I migrated from phpBB, where I knew how to delete a (slow) forum category, merging all its threads into another forum category.

This happens frequently with new Boards: The new website is built with lots of interesting categories, but the traffic isn't high enough to keep them all busy, so the owner decides to prune the number of topic areas, but doesn't want to lose any threads.

I want to consolidate the existing threads into fewer, broader, categories.

How do I do this with FireBoard?

Thanks.

This is not possible at this time with Fireboard.

Oh.


I am not at all averse to changing field contents of SQL tables via phpMyAdmin.

Is there a single forum-ID-field in a table-of-all-posts; such that, if the value of that field is changed for all the posts that had been in forum-A, it would effectively change the forum of the posts to forum-B, such that (if I didn't miss or mess any of them) all the threads would still be intact but in forum-B and without messing up the threads previously in forum-B?

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OK. I just looked at the tables. Question:

What would happen if I gave an SQL command to change the catID field to 8 in all of the rows in content_fb_messages that have catID=9 ?

Would that merge all the forum#9 threads into forum#8? Any problems envisaged???

Well... nobody's said it should work, and nobody's said it won't. So I guess it's time to backup the database, do it, and see if it breaks everything. I'll report the results here.

I tried it, and it appears to work.

In phpMyAdmin, I first backed up `content_fb_messages`.

Then ran a query like:

UPDATE `accordio_mambo1`.`content_fb_messages` SET `catid` = '8' WHERE `content_fb_messages`.`catid` ='9'

Then I unpublished the now empty forum category.

Then did it again for another pair of forum categories.

So far, it appears to have worked.

Result:
I merged two pairs of categories, turning a 7 category forum into a 5 category forum, eliminating the two categories that were least recently posted to.

If anybody tries something similar and discovers any obscure problems, please let me know.

So far, so good.

this would be a very useful feature to have

It's been over six months, and no problems have appeared. So all you need to do is change that one field.

hi JLW,

thanks for the post, that is what I was looking!

Lets try!

Thanks!

-- EDITED --

That works! thank you again!