Blog posts - Edit date of post for backdating?

[ajlaporte]

Is it possible to backdate blog posts that are created on the community product? Was looking to move a blog over to the community and I can see that you can add it as a draft and also schedule a post. I was curious if you could also set the post date to be in the past? 

[CarolineS]

Hi @ajlaporte!

You can create blog posts with arbitrary dates using the “manual migration” feature which the support team can turn on for you. This lets you post content via the admin console as any user for any date. 

Cheers!

[ajlaporte]

Hi @CarolineS! Thanks for the reply. Do you know if you can also populate that date via the API's "create message" as well if turned on? With all the content we are going to migrate, changing all the dates manually via the admin console might be time-consuming (unless there is a quicker way to do it all). 

[CarolineS]

Not sure if you can do this via API or not, sorry!

[ajlaporte]

I'll reach out to support directly on the API part but thank you for at least letting me know it is something that can be done in the admin console! Appreciate the help @CarolineS

[ajlaporte]

Hi @CarolineS , 

Do you happen to have any documentation that Khoros sent along the way on how to use the manual migration? I have tried entering in the message id's when trying to transfer content and it keeps telling me

"The blog post or comment you are trying to access is not available."

Which doesn't make sense as I can see them clear as day and am entering to the appropriate parent ID of the message to be transferred over to the new area that was selected. 

[CarolineS]

Hi!

I don't have any documentation about Manual Migration, alas! 

I have never used the "ID of parent message in board" field. I just select the node I want (from the top of admin, as usual for node selection) & then, once on Manual Migration, I plop in the ID of the author I want to have as the author of the post, and then paste in the subject & body.

What are you trying to use the "ID of parent message in board" field for? Just curious as I don't really know what it's for 🙂

Cheers!

[ajlaporte]

Ah I see. My thought was to use the API to import posts to a blog that would only be viewable by myself and then use the Manual Migration to simply copy those posts over from one area to another with the correct dates. 

From what it looks like, you should be able to:

• find the parent message id (Ex: "id":"686") from a post in one forum/blog (ex: Blog A)
• use the node selector to go to the new blog (es: Blog B)
• go to the manual migration area
• add the author id (ex: 200) into the author field
• add the blog id (686) for the message from the other board (Blog A) then leave all the fields blank and click post

Theoretically, you would then be moving from Blog A to Blog B without having to edit the post body at all. 

If I can get it working, I will be happy to reply back here and let you know how I did it 🙂 

[CarolineS]

Ah ha, now I get it. Seems like a neat way to do it if it works!

[MarkAtTruth]

This seems valuable in cases where you edit the post and then publish it and somehow the post date gets changed to the current date instead of the original date. I've had this happen and it is confusing as there are comments already and they are before the post actually happened.  You certainly have to be careful though as some people could see this as disingenuous.  Definitely for importing old content I think this is valuable as well.

[ajlaporte]

Totally agree with you on the disingenuous point @MarkAtTruth. You really do have to be careful when doing that. As long as you are transparent with your audience I think they would be understanding (similar to how people on Reddit use the old "Edit: " thing to let folks know why they edited their comment).

There is another thread in the forums I started where I had a use case laid out:
https://community.khoros.com/t5/Developer-Discussion/Backdating-a-message-with-create-message-API/m-...