It's a bit of a long explanation, but the nice part is that almost everything is imported: all revisions, votes, badges, reputation history, etc.

The process runs quite slow - for a few hundred questions it may take 10 or 15 minutes. It will hopefully (we'll try hard) improve by the time your SE contract expires, so no worries.

User profile preferences are currently lost and milliseconds in the timestamps :).

Install Askbot

Use git to get the source:

git clone git://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel.git yousitename

Or just download the tar or zip file here.

Please choose some distinct name for "yoursitename" for the destination directory. Do not call it test, forum or anything else suspiciously non-descript - that's because some python modules might use that name and you might get strange errors.

For now please do use "master" branch (it's checked out by git or download automatically), or use the other one if you are OK with experimenting (experimental branch with the new interface has full text search disabled - will be merged after the fix in about a week - don't give up on askbot :)

Open file settings.py and delete the # character before 'stackexchange':

  #'stackexchange',

This is the first extra instruction in addition to what's in INSTALL (there are only two extra steps). This one will add SE loader application to the list of installed apps.

Follow instructions in file INSTALL.

Minimally you'll need to

cp settings_local.py.dist settings_local.py

enter database type, password and user name, and set up other details thereafter.

Double-check that the thing works in the Django development server. For *nix command is:

python manage.py runserver `hostname -i`:8989

8989 - is a port number - on Unix systems you can usually pick any number > 1024 unless you have superuser privilege.

After that for production you will need to configure the webserver, details for Apache are described here.

SE dump read

unzip your dump into some directory, say my-se-dump

then run (the second extra instruction)

python manage.py load_stackexchange my-se-dump

Hopefully that will be all - I've tested this on MySQL only.

You have any difficulties - please by all means drop a note right here.

Yep it is a bit dorky at the moment - will be fixed way before your SE site expires :).

Also if you trust me - you can send the dump to evgeny.fadeev@gmail.com and I'll import it for you.

Cheers!