Just want to confirm that you can only move Yahoo and Google groups to Groups.io, or can I (fingers crossed) move my Big Tent group and all the messages from the forum to Groups.io?
Just want to confirm that you can only move Yahoo and Google groups to Groups.io,
Those are the only ones with some automation to smooth the path.
or can I (fingers crossed) move my Big Tent group and all the messages from the forum to Groups.io?
I haven't heard anything about that. You should ask [email protected] if that's something that can be done, either one-off or as a new automated procedure.
If you can export at least your Big Tent members list (their email addresses) then at the minimum you could invite them to a new group at Groups.io, or using the "Group Transfer" upgrade you can Direct Add them. The messages and other content maybe not so much. Mark (at Groups.io) has indicated in the past that he can bring in messages stored in an mbox format file, but there haven't been any recent reports from users who've had him do that.
Please post again here to let us know what you learn, or if you have more questions.
Yep, it's my understanding that Big Tent is shutting down at the end of the year.
I would like to see some ability to migrate Big Tent groups, Meetup groups and several others. However, in each case it would require a message archive export (along with files, etc) on the originating end. Unfortunately, in many cases, that functionality?does not exist.
Bruce -- The system Help is your friend.??/static/help
Thanks Bruce and Shal for you answers. ?Downloading the member list is not a problem, we just have 10 years of messages stored on the Big Tent forum that I fear will all be lost. ?Big Tent says there is no way to export the posts. ?Just wanted to double confirm on this side. ?Ugh :( Thanks again Nell
I'm also looking to migrate a BigTent group to Groups.io.
Here's BigTent's FAQ on their upcoming shut-down.
Milt Baker
As of 12/31/18 BigTent Will Be Shutting Down
The BigTent Team
Thank you so much for being a part of the BigTent Community.? As of 12/31/18 we will be retiring the site and members will no longer have access to either the website or Apps.? ??
We've put together a list of FAQ's for both members and group leaders.
?
Why is BigTent Shutting Down??
At Care.com, we are constantly evolving and working to provide relevant products and services to families and caregivers.Unfortunately, we¡¯ve decided that the Big Tent is no longer the best place for us to focus, and we¡¯ve decided to shut it down. We apologize if this causes any inconvenience to you, and we appreciate your feedback on this matter!
?
Member FAQ's
How do I close my BigTent account??
You can deactivate your BigTent account at any time. This action will remove you from all your BigTent groups and will remove your profile from our system. You will no longer have access to BigTent or any groups' content.
To close your BigTent account, simply follow these steps:
Sign in to BigTent.
?Go to [your name] > Settings > Close account.
Click "Deactivate Account."
Once you confirm that you want to deactivate account, you will be removed from BigTent and your memberships in all of your groups will be terminated immediately.????
?
How do I leave a group /subgroup?
To permanently remove yourself from a group / subgroup and immediately cancel your membership:
Go to [your name] > Settings > Membership info.
Click "leave group" under the group or subgroup name.?
Once you confirm that you want to leave the group, you will be removed from it immediately.
?
?
Group? Leaders/Administrator FAQ's
How to delete a BigTent group
We do not allow admins to do this themselves because of the consequences of mistakenly deleting an active group. Please send an email to?support@...?to have our team delete your group.
?
Do you have any suggestions for alternatives to BigTent?
Here are a few of the alternatives that we know of that are similar to BigTent *
Facebook groups
Club Express
Google Groups
Wild Apricot
Meet-up
YahooGroups
?
*BigTent does not recommend or endorse any of these
... we just have 10 years of messages stored on the Big Tent forum that I fear will all be lost.? Big Tent says there is no way to export the posts.
?
Milt's message indicated you should contact them. Have you tried that?
Failing that, if you can read the messages online then you can screen-scrape them. That's essentially what the transfer agent does with Yahoo Groups. You can copy/paste them by hand (as tedious as that would be) or find someone with the skill set to write a tool to do that for you.
?
There's an example of such an application, written as a plug-in for the Chrome browser, that works for Yahoo Groups. Something similar may be possible with Big Tent.
You might also ask Personal Groupware. They make downloaders for Y!Groups, LinkedIn, and Facebook. They might be willing to take on Big Tent.
Yes it would be good if someone at groups.io could contact some at Big Tent and then a mutually beneficial takeover.
I sent Mark an email as soon as I heard about the BigTent closure. But I doubt he would be interested in a takeover, at least not in the sense of continuing to run that service on its own code.
I thought though that he might be interested in setting up a transfer automation, as he's done for Yahoo and Google groups, but I've no idea what would be involved in doing that - or whether cooperation from BigTent would be needed or helpful in making that work.
BigTent users who want to migrate here might wish to create a topic on beta asking for a transfer feature. I don't see such a topic yet.
They might also suggest to BigTent that Groups.io be included in the list of alternatives on their FAQ about the shutdown.
Two major concerns, from Groups.io's point of view, I imagine would be:
1) The short time remaining before the end-of-year shutdown. We've seen how long it has taken to get the Y!groups transfer process smoothed out, and to get any substantial number of groups moved over. Part of that is the dysfunction at Yahoo Groups, and part of it is that there's no clear "drop dead" date to motivate Y!Group owners, but I think the time would be a major concern.
2) The economics of doing it. How many Big Tent groups would come over as Premium or Enterprise groups? Would the effort in building a transfer mechanism pay off, even in the long term? How does it compare to other things Mark could be doing (the opportunity cost)? Remember that Groups.io is neither a charity nor ad-supported. So upgraded groups are the bread-and-butter around here.
I think advocates of a BigTent transfer need to address those issues as best they can. For (1) I think it would be almost essential for a BigTent group owner, or maybe a group of them, very knowledgeable in the details of how BigTent works, to be leading the charge, and working closely with Mark to on implementation and testing. In the case of Yahoo and Google groups Mark was able to create his own test groups to migrate, but that's no longer possible with BigTent.
Good news, I think, from BigTent on migrating a group!
I contacted BigTent Support for help, as the FAQs recommend, and found help immediately.? It was clear from the initial exchange of emails that BigTent Support really only wants to deal with the moderator or "administrator" they have listed for the BigTent forum in question.? Once we took care of that and got the moderator of the original BigTent group in the picture, it took only a few days before BigTent Support sent her an export .tsv.gz file of virtually all of our group's discussions.? According to one of our moderators who know much more than I do about migrating data:
"File looks good. I unziped the file. The format is very straightforward. Every entry is a single line. Responses are designated as comment: <original subject>. The text has embeded html break strings to denote newlines in the text."
I believe our next step will be to try moving the data to our new group at Groups.io and see how it flies.
Naturally, I have questions along the following lines but the days ahead ought to provide answers:
--How do we move the data to Groups.io?
--Can we get help from Groups.io Support in doing that?
?
--When put up the data, can/will it be broken down into individual posts/threads as it originally appeared on BigTent?
?
--Should we try to add a part of the file first, and test it?? Or move the whole file?
?
--Then should our moderators beta test it and see how it flies?
For the membership list, you can use Invite, or upgrade your group to use Direct Add.
For the messages and other content that's less clear. If Big Tent had exported the message content as an mbox format file there'd be a greater chance that [email protected] could import it for you. If they have to figure out some ad hoc format that BigTent invented then that would impede the effort.
--Can we get help from Groups.io Support in doing that?
No better way to find out than to ask [email protected] - I'd be interested in hearing what they have to say on the subject.
--When put up the data, can/will it be broken down into individual posts/threads as it originally appeared on BigTent?
That depends. If support adds your message archive to your group's Messages section then it would be. But if you can't get support to do that then no, most likely not.
The brief description you gave indicates that the archive may be in HTML format, intended to be loaded into a web page as a static display of the messages. If so, then the question would be whether you would find that presentation acceptable.
--Should we try to add a part of the file first, and test it? Or move the whole file?
Two things you might do with it are to upload it (whole) to your group's Files section, or to copy/paste it into your group's Wiki section, likely broken up somehow relating to the structure in the archive.
A more challenging task would be to copy/paste each individual post in the archive into a New Topic or Reply in your group's Messages section. That would likely be too tedious and error-prone to do by hand, but someone with appropriate skills may be able to do it through Groups.io's API. The downside with this is that I don't think you can avoid having these created posts carry the current date/time (rather than the original) and the name of the person creating them (rather than the original poster). As far as I know only support can create the messages with copied original metadata.
--Then should our moderators beta test it and see how it flies?
Certainly. You'll need to delve into that archive a bit to see what you actually have and what you can do with it. At worst you'll need to delete what you've uploaded so far and start again as you try different approaches. Just make sure to keep the original copy of the archive unmodified so that you don't accidentally lose any data.
If I were you, I'd create a throw-away experimental group to work in, rather than try any of this in your target group before it is ready for prime time. Then, if you get a bunch of messed-up messages added, you can just delete the group and create experimental group #2 for further testing.
Good news, I think, from BigTent on migrating a group!
I contacted BigTent Support for help, as the FAQs recommend, and found help immediately. It was clear from the initial exchange of emails that BigTent Support really only wants to deal with the moderator or "administrator" they have listed for the BigTent forum in question. Once we took care of that and got the moderator of the original BigTent group in the picture, it took only a few days before BigTent Support sent her an export .tsv.gz file of virtually all of our group's discussions. According to one of our moderators who know much more than I do about migrating data:
"File looks good. I unziped the file. The format is very straightforward. Every entry is a single line. Responses are designated as comment: <original subject>. The text has embeded html break strings to denote newlines in the text."
I believe our next step will be to try moving the data to our new group at Groups.io and see how it flies.
Naturally, I have questions along the following lines but the days ahead ought to provide answers:
--How do we move the data to Groups.io?
--Can we get help from Groups.io Support in doing that? --When put up the data, can/will it be broken down into individual posts/threads as it originally appeared on BigTent? --Should we try to add a part of the file first, and test it? Or move the whole file? --Then should our moderators beta test it and see how it flies?
Any further thoughts on this are most welcome. Milt Baker
If I were you, I'd create a throw-away experimental group to work in, rather than try any of this in your target group before it is ready for prime time. Then, if you get a bunch of messed-up messages added, you can just delete the group and create experimental group #2 for further testing.
Upon request, BigTent Support sent our group's BigTent moderator a dump of all discussions dating from the time the group moved to BigTent in 2014 up to to a few days ago.? It took a few days for them to get this done.? The dump was in .tgz format, and our tech guru, Bob Leder,?successfully created a simple python program to convert the entries from that dump into email messages and mail them individually to our??group.? They're showing up just perfectly on the new group. Looks like he's nailed the process,?and he has just emailed BigTent support that if they are interested he'll go through the process of making the program more presentable and forward it.? If anyone here would like it, please contact Bob directly:?Robert Leder?<robertfleder@...>
?
Bob has also asked BigTent if we can get a .tgz or?other dump?of our files and/or pictures.? He notes that we could have someone manually do the work or he try to hack together a program?to to?the download, but it would obviously be easier if BigTent could provide a dump or link.? That was just sent and we've had no response yet from BigTent.
Bottom line: BigTent Support has been more helpful with our migration than we expected.? Thanks to that, it looks like moving our group from BigTent to Groups.io is going to be much easier than we expected.? I'll keep this forum informed of our progress.
BigTent responded saying that they will not take action on requests from anyone other than the current moderator of a group, so we will funnel our request through the current moderator.? I'll do a post here on any response we receive.
BigTent responded saying that they will not take action on requests from anyone other than the current moderator of a group, so we will funnel our request through the current moderator. I'll do a post here on any response we receive.
I had meant to reply to that message but hadn't gotten to it yet. So I guess now's the time.
The dump was in .tgz format, and our tech guru, Bob Leder, successfully created a simple python program to convert the entries from that dump into email messages and mail them individually to our groups.io group. They're showing up just perfectly on the new group.
Presumably they're showing as From Bob, and with the date he ran the program. Did he include the original poster's name and the original date in his (program's) messages?
In any case though, bravo!
It seems to me that something of the sort could be done with messages caught in any proprietary format - such as a PG Offline export of a Yahoo Group, or an mbox export from a Mailman list, or ...
I've had some emails with Mark Fletcher about this and he confirms that if any BigTent mod wants to import to Groups.io, and can get their archive into mbox format, then they should zip (or gzip) the mbox file and upload it to online file storage somewhere.
Then send an email to [email protected] with a link to the uploaded file and the particulars of the group to which it should be uploaded. Mark didn't mention it, but I would imagine the group's own Files section could be used for this, presuming that the archive fits. Which it certainly ought to if you zip or gzip it.
Upon request, BigTent Support sent our group's BigTent moderator a dump of all discussions dating from the time the group moved to BigTent in 2014 up to to a few days ago. It took a few days for them to get this done.
That's very good news for anyone looking to move here from BigTent.
The dump was in .tgz format, ...
That's a common compressed format, similar in function (but not detail) to zip file format. By itself that doesn't tell you anything about the file(s) inside the tgz (TAR GZip) file.
and our tech guru, Bob Leder, successfully created a simple python program to convert the entries from that dump into email messages and mail them individually to our groups.io group.
So your group's problem is likely solved to your satisfaction.
For other BigTent group mods Bob's utility is probably a good place to start for a utility that will convert that dump into an mbox file. Mbox is a concatenation of raw email messages, so it may be as simple as doing a file capture of the messages after they are formed and then not sending them (don't call the SMTP part of the program).
If Bob would be willing to make a version of his utility that outputs an mbox file, that would be a big help for others. The advantage of having Groups.io import it, versus what Bob did, is that support can put the original message Date: and From: information in place in the group's Messages.
This is probably also an opportunity for those wanting to import from Mailman lists or other services that can deliver your archive in mbox format (or in a format you can convert to mbox).
I don't think Mark is willing to take on the effort to research and implement conversion utilities from BigTent or other formats, so that part of the process is on you, the person wanting the import.
Shal Farley
Bruce
Milt Baker
