In the same vein, there were several Yahoo Groups importers that eventually were abandoned when Yahoo made changes to their system to flummox them. An email-to-nodebb importer could be the ideal solution for Google Groups, and other forums which support subscribing to posts by email. I'm brand new here, please point me in the right direction if this feature already exists!
I'm trying out nodebb on behalf of my neighborhood. We have an old Yahoo Group which most have abandoned due to rampant censorship. We moved to Nextdoor, but the corporate nazis betrayed us by kicking our admins out and handing the group over to... the same clowns who run the old Yahoo Group! (the HOA) Again, it's totally censored now. Old posts have been deleted which now exist only as saved emails. Under the circumstances, a self-hosted forum is all we can bring ourselves to consider now.
Nodebb looks like a really modern, clean and potentially simple environment to please both our smartphonin' hipsters and crusty old retirees alike. Importation of our old messages would really win the contest. Otherwise, we're keen to just launch a traditional phpBB forum for that benefit. We have a genuine need to symbolically "seize" the old forums thus, bringing censored conversations back to light, along with remarks made by our HOA figures that help our neighbors to understand their leadership skills more accurately. (grin)
We have several years worth of public conversation from the old forums in the form of emails, and we'd like to import them into nodebb as posts. Threads would be constructed by the Subject: lines, and order would depend on the respective dates, and user stubs should be automatically created out of each name/email found in the From: line of the emails. (users can "reset their password" to acquire ownership of their account and posts) We can package these emails for simple import in a single unix mail spool file by using an IMAP email client. We'd also like to continually import new emails from the legacy forums automatically. It would be a plus if the importer could strip out the To: lines for anonymity, and the java/html crap Nextdoor embeds to spy on us, because the legacy forum moderators would kill the accounts we use to monitor them if they could.
I'm not even sure a phpBB-to-nodebb importer would work as an interim step, as Yahoo-to-phpBB importers have been abandoned due to Yahoo's format changes, and mail-to-phpBB projects known to us appear to be incomplete:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/grabyahoogroup/