experiences with the re-running DW importer?

[ratcreature]

So I've imported my LJ to DW in 2009 and consistently crossposted from DW since, so if I rerun it now, and only import comments, will that work out like you'd want it to? I.e. I get a backup of all the newer comments on the LJ entries added to my DW entries, but older comments won't be duplicated?

Comments

[st_aurafina]

From what I've heard doesn't duplicate comments, unless you've had a name change in the interim.

[ratcreature]

Some of the commenters changed their names but probably not too many. So I will probably risk it to get the LJ comments archived.

[sholio]

It will not duplicate, no. It just imports the new ones. I had a problem with entire entries being duplicated when I changed the name on my account (I never did figure out a way to fix that, short of manually deleting; there's still two of everything before 2010 or so) but it doesn't normally do that.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, my name hasn't changed though some of the people who commented had names changes so I guess it might duplicate those?

[sholio]

Hmmm. That thought didn't even occur to me! I've never noticed my comments being duplicated anywhere, though, so possibly it doesn't double up comments, or else they fixed it? I did mention it to them, so they might have done something about it -- I changed my journal names (friendshipper --> sholio) very early in my time on DW, so it's possible that in the 5+ years since then, it's stopped being a problem.

[mific]

*frowns* I just tried to import LJ comments, but it won't let me only import those - it wants to import all the journal entries as well, and I don't want duplicates. No name change, but in my case there seems to be no way just to import comments.

[ratcreature]

For me neither, now that I'm looking at the importer options, I guess I'll have to hope that it will recognize the entries as intended and doesn't mess anything up. :(

[ratcreature]

Which it did. It did duplicate entries I crossposted :(

ETA: Though it recognized many correctly and behave like I hoped (merging the comments) as well. I think it had most of its problems either with special feature posts, or the newer once after my LJ had fewer icons so entries posted with the default icon there but have a different one here. Also in a number of instances I seem to have corrected a typo on DW and the crossposter never managed to sync, so now in reverse it reimported the different versions and such.

I filed a support request, but I suspect I'll have to manually delete a lot of duplicate entries that had no comments on LJ, and live with a couple of duplicates where it didn't merge but there were comments.

[sholio]

Oh noooo!! I'm so sorry for giving you bad advice. :(

That's so weird, though, because I've run the import probably a couple dozen times (in the early days, I used to do it every couple of months while I still had most of my activity at LJ) and the only time it ever duplicated things was that one time I'd put in a rename token. I mean, in those cases where I'd individually posted to either side (when a fic was too long for one LJ post, or I wanted to do a poll on each side) obviously I had two, but not in other cases.

I'm so so sorry!! I know how incredibly frustrating it is to have doubles! I wish now that I'd deleted my old doubled up entries when it happened, because now people have commented on some of them and I have no idea which are the ones that would be kept and which would be doubled when I run the import again, so my DW archive before about 2011-ish is basically unusable.

[ratcreature]

I filed a support request. Some instances are maybe explained by entries being different (like with crossposted polls) they have a poll on DW and a link on LJ or such, but some don't seem any different, have the same time stamp etc.

If there isn't some automatic fix, I will go through the duplicates and delete the ones that don't have any comments. But of course some of the LJ imports that are duplicates have the comments from there. With those I think I will change the privacy setting to private, so I have a backup of the comments here, but in case somebody checks out old entries only the original DW one is available for adding new comments.

[ratcreature]

It looks like support has a tool that could automatically fix the duplicates in my case. So I won't have to manually delete them.

Unfortunately now the LJ comments from those have not been put with the DW entry. But they also said that the duplicate cleanup tool fixed the metadata so a future import won't create duplicates. So maybe I can just run the importer again to get the missing comments. Though to be on the safe side I asked support before running it again.

[sholio]

Fingers crossed! Also, I wonder if the support tool could fix mine too. I'd probably lose any additional comments on the duplicates at this point (and I know I did get a few, on some of my older fic and vid posts in particular) but it can't be too many.

[ratcreature]

It can't hurt to ask. Maybe it can even recognize duplicates that have new comments and won't delete those.

[ratcreature]

It seems to have worked with the second importer run. I haven't gone through every entry but spot checked and it looks okay now.

[sholio]

If it finds a duplicate, it just doesn't import it. That is, it won't double-import entries unless you changed your name since the time you did your last import (and maybe not even then, if they fixed that bug). I think you have to select entries in order to import anything else, but it'll just be like "welp, that's already there" - the basic idea with not letting you select comments by itself is that you can't import comments if there's nowhere to import them *to*.

ETA: Except I just read ratcreature's addition and now I'm so confused, because I've backed up my LJ to DW a number of times and never had that happen except the one time after I'd put in a rename token. Now I'm just confused.

[ratcreature]

On the support board I've seen post at least one other post about a recent import with the same problem, i.e. duplicates of some entries after import, also some explained by edits and such, but not all. So it's not just me. Maybe they can pin down what causes this, so people can be forewarned in the FAQ or maybe this problem avoided.