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From my blog: http://blog.bbsers.org/tattoo/

Just like John Resig said, "google group is dead". Google group has very limited functions and there is not improvement on it for a very long time. Especially for the people in the mainland of China, they even need to find some special ways (SSH tunnel, VPN, Tor, etc) to visit google groups.

I maintained a google group for our baseball club for about 5 years. But since last year our club members cannot visit the web interface of our google group, and the new comers even cannot sign in this group. And most of our club members like to use web brower to have discussion but not using emails. So I started to plan a migration.

Also like what Resig did for JQuery forum, I searched for a solution to backup the posts in our google group so I can import them to our new forum system. However, google does not provide such a function for us. If I have a email account that only receives the mails from our google group, I think I can extract data from the mail box. But I don’t have such a email account.

It also took me a long time on choosing the forum system. I considered a lot of open source forum systems, such as phpBB, but most of them cannot match the habit of Chinese people, until I found Discuz. It is written by php and use mysql as backend database, and it has all the features I can image, and the most important: it is written by Chinese. So I decide to migrate our google group to DiscuzX.

I took about one week to complete my extract-google-group tool and then successfully extracted all the posts of our google group to SQL format, and imported them into our new discuzX forum. So it is a tool that really works, however, it is a 1-time using tool. So I won’t spend time on it anymore.

Here is the code location: https://github.com/tangramor/extract-google-group

• ExtractGoogleGroup.py: it is the core class file, you need to use the methods provided by it to implement you own extract script

• GoogleGroupToDiscuzSql.py: it is my script to extract google group data and tranform them into DiscuzX SQL. I have used it to import more than 4,000 posts into our new DiscuzX forum

• UTF8CSV.py: it is copied out from Python document to read CSV file in UTF-8 format

To use ExtractGoogleGroup.py, you need to export the members information from your google group (will get a groupName_group_members.csv), and it will be used to extract user name and email address from the format user…@gmail.com (google use this to prevent robots). It should have bug here because there may be 2 users have the tailored email address format, but it is enough for my google group… :D

Then you can create you own transformation script by refering to GoogleGroupToDiscuzSql.py

I hope this tool is useful for the forum administrators or the google group owners who want to backup the data of there groups.