My new vBulletin forum is empty, and I want to encourage new users to visit, like and contribute. But first, I need to make it...not empty. As an admin, I could manually type in a bunch of threads, all from 'admin' - but that won't work. One look at either an empty website or a site filled with admin posts are equally undesirable. So I need to add hundreds of posts from hundreds of users before day one.
I assume that I should do this via the database, which I can access from phpMyAdmin via cPanel. I tried to download (export) the 'user' table with its 74 columns as a CSV table for MS Excel, but when I opened it in Excel, it was not in table form - it was all , and " in a string. If I could only see it laid out nicely in Excel, I could paste hundreds of usernames into the USER table, and and hundreds of articles into the THREAD table. I think. Am I missing something?
I am definitely going to fake it until I make it - there is simply no other way with a new website. The question is whether I have to manually do it from the front end for each user and each new thread (weeks of work), or whether I can paste them all into the database in a couple of hours.
Please help. Thanks.
Just regarding Excel, use the 'Text to Columns' tool on the Data tab to convert the CSV string into columns.
Where are you getting the content from to pre-load your forum though? If you have to make it up anyway, then is there much actual time saving in loading data in via phpMyAdmin in reality?
Assuming you have some content available from somewhere though, then you can export to CSV again from Excel and use a CSV to SQL tool (eg. https://codebeautify.org/csv-to-sql-converter though there are others around also) to generate SQL INSERT statements for uploading via phpMyAdmin or other DB tools. (I don't recall if phpMyAdmin has a SQL file upload mechanism or if you just have to paste the SQL into the browser window... have not used it for a good few years now).