Importer status

[denise]

At this point, imports are running almost as soon as you submit them, and we've gotten through more or less the entire backlog (barring a few large community imports that need some extra babysitting). We've contacted several people whose imports have been failing to let them know what the problem was, and how they can fix it. If we didn't contact you, but you've tried importing your journal or community and gotten failures more than 10 times since 10 Mar, either let us know here (with the account name and any error messages you've gotten) or by email at support@dreamwidth.org and we'll look into it further!

Comments

[mybeautifulwars]

You guys rock! You do so much to keep us all together <3

[denise]

I'm starting to get a little punchy, heh.

[mybeautifulwars]

completely understandable ;) *sends over some 'good punch'* Thank you for all you do!

[muccamukk]

Thank you so much for all your work on this! You are all amazing!

[ishte]

On a whim, after trying for days and giving up for days, I decided to try one more time, and voila! My import happened. JUST LIKE THAT. I couldn't believe it. I had just about written off any chance of getting my entries from LJ to import and being able to read them in anything other than the messy spreadsheet/xml format that I had been able to download myself. 17 years, all the way back to my very first in 2003 post including comments. I'm impressed how seamless it looks.

So THANK YOU for everything you've done to rescue my LiveJournal from the Oligarchy. Maybe nothing bad will happen to it, but I just can't stand the idea of keeping a paid account there any more.

Now I just have to figure out how to get my CSS to work here, as the style it's built on doesn't seem to be available and I have been searching for stylesheet templates so I can find one that will do what I want. (Then all I have to do is plug in my graphic paths.)

[denise]

We completely redesigned the style system from LiveJournal's version, yes! You can technically create a custom style with the code from the base style of whatever LJ style you were using (don't ask me how to do it, honestly, I understand nothing about the style system, but there are instructions somewhere in style_system I think) but we very, very much do not recommend that you do that: a style that was written for LJ won't have access to any of the journal or style features we've added in the last 13 years, and may occasionally break because we've had to make changes to the style core. I very very very much recommend picking a native DW style and recreating the look of your old layout. Again, style_system is an unofficial comm but full of very helpful people!

Custom Style Sheets and Templates

[ishte]

I'm not really looking to use the code from my LJ layouts. I used the S2 style Bloggish unstyled for years and years because I found a template someone posted showing the correct order and field names for the CSS. So once I figured out how it worked (and this was a big learning curve for me. as at the time I'd worked with HTML but never done any CSS coding.) I could easily change the appearance of my journal just by plugging new graphics address into the different fields in my template. So what I'm looking for is more like an example of a css template for a style that does not have coding specific to the style that can't be overridden with an !important tag. So for example, I tried one that left a red border around what in LiveJournal is tagged as um... "#container", which I didn't want. I haven't fooled with it much yet. I'll figure it out though. I'll go study the links you provided and see what I can figure out. I've just been too busy to devote much time to it. Once I have a layout that works the way I want it to, and has things where I want them. (that doesn't tend to change once I'm settled on it.) Then I'll have the CSS to do what I want going forward with whatever style I end up settling on.

Re: Custom Style Sheets and Templates

[denise]

Very belatedly, but: all of our styles assign the same CSS selectors to the same items, so once you learn what controlls what, it's the same in every style.

Re: Custom Style Sheets and Templates

[ishte]

No worries. This is actually really useful information. I've kind of got something going with my layout now, but haven't had time to really dig into it deeply yet, so things don't look exactly like I planned them. It's nice to know that the tags don't vary from style to style. That was an annoying 'feature' I encountered sometimes on LJ until I finally just settled on one style and just built all my own layouts on that style to keep changes simple. So thanks for the follow up on that.

[4ofswords]

Thanks for these updates. I was about to just give up on importing comments but I tried again today and third time was the charm!

[4ofswords]

Unfortunately now my image import is botched 😬

[denise]

Sadly, we can't import images from Scrapbook because LJ don't provide any data feed that lets us get at that information. If you check the last post in this comm (sorry no link but I'm on my phone) there's a few ways you can at least grab them locally.

[4ofswords]

I don't know what scrapbook is. When I did my first import of my journal entries, the images imported. This time they didn't (but the comments did). I'd rather have the images and not the comments.

[denise]

I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by 'the images', then! If you mean photos that you uploaded to LiveJournal, that's what I mean by Scrapbook; Scrapbook is LiveJournal's photo hosting system. If you mean something else, can you unlock an entry that's having the problem so I can see what you mean?

[4ofswords]

I meant images in my posts. I re-imported just now and they are back. So I am all good! :)

[tyger]

FINALLY went and made a backup account for my old LJ, which I've been meaning to do for years. Had to do some shenanigans on the LJ side because apparently they make you change passwords now if you haven't logged in for uh... almost a decade actually... but other than that it worked super well! :D The only thing I was hoping for but yez didn't get was my inactive icons, which I'm guessing you just simply CAN'T get, which is totally fair!

Anyway, bought a paid account for said backup account even though I won't actually use it as anything but a backup, as a thank you as much as anything! :D Thanks for keeping the importer working so well!!! :D :D :D

[denise]

Yeah, inactive icons don't show on the icons page so we can't get them!

[tyger]

I don't suppose you know if you upload the icon here with the same keywords, will it magically sub it in where appropriate? It's fine either way, of course, just curious as much as anything.

[denise]

It will, yes!

[tyger]

\o/ Excellent! :D

[sparky955]

Thank all of you for creating a wonderful site !!!

[20_00]

Hello!
I'm trying to import a community from https://potsreotizm-new.livejournal.com/ to https://potsreotizm-new.dreamwidth.org/ with a special technical account under my control -- NyldraethShade.

Posts: successful!
Comments: failure. Error fetching metadata.
In the last few days, all of the several attempts have been unsuccessful. Only the posts.

I do not insist, but if you can help, it would be very good. Thank you!

[denise]

Thanks! We will see what we can do.

[20_00]

Thank you! Success! Just now the comments were imported successfully. You were very helpful, thank you very much.

[denise]

We think we finally figured out the problem!! Thank you very much for your patience. We appreciate it a lot.

[20_00]

I see, thank you very much, I will wait for your instructions. After your comments I got the error:
"Your comments have failed to import and will not be retried.
FATAL: Comment has no remote ID! Aborting!"
Not doing anything myself, just waiting.

[denise]

Yes, it will take us a little bit of time to fix it, but now we know what is wrong. :) We have put your community on the list of things that we need to fix! I will tell you if you need to do anything else. I think we will be able to fix it for you without you having to do anything! I will let you know.

[20_00]

Thanks for your help! I'll be waiting for the information.

[20_00]

Hello!
As far as I can tell, the comments were moved completely yesterday! I checked selectively, and by the counter in profile. Thank you very much, you made it!

[denise]

Hooray! I'm glad it worked!

[beffeysue]

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything!!! 💖
Beth

[the_beasts]

thankyou so so much everyone for all your hard work!

we appreciate you hugely. <3

[becofoz]

I've been trying to import my comments for the past week at least two or three times a day (leaving a gap between each import) and I am having no success. Friends have commented saying that there's have finally been successful but I'm just having no luck.

This was the latest error message - Failure running job: Lost connection to MySQL server during query at /dw/cgi-bin/DW/Worker/ContentImporter/Local/Comments.pm line 173.

[denise]

Got it! I have put you on The List(tm) and will investigate. You may receive random success/failure notices in your inbox over the next few days as we try to figure out what's the problem (since it doesn't look like your account has enough comments to cause the problem we just figured out last night): if you do, don't worry, it was us. You don't need to start a new import attempt unless I come back and tell you that you do!

[becofoz]

Awesome. Thanks so much for your hard work. (And I must have been tired when I posted my first comment because now I spot a glaring grammatical error...whoops).

[weatheringtea]

Thank you so so much for everything you've been doing to get through this arduous process!!

[skaneverdies]

BIG thank you for making this all happen. A friend just tipped me off to the platform, so I didn't experience any of these issues. Signed up, backed up, and kicked back. Was done in less than 10 minutes. Thanks again.

[denise]

Welcome! We're glad to have you :)

[arlenerios]

I was just able to import my entire LJ and I was O_O that it happened to quickly. Thank you so much! Gracias!

[badly_knitted]

I started importing from https://badly-knitted.livejournal.com/ to https://bk-forever.dreamwidth.org/ (which isn't my main journal but one I set up a few years ago specifically as a backup for my LJ) getting on for two days ago now and it still says Journal comments - Waiting for entries to finish and
Journal entries - Waiting for tags and groups to finish. Should I just keep waiting or start again?

[denise]

*looks at your import status* Well, that's weird, I have no idea what happened there. (It says it failed on the importing friend groups step, but it looks like it didn't actually pass the failure along to the scheduler.) Try one more time and if it doesn't work (I forget which of the jobs starting a 'duplicate' import kills) let me know and I'll go see if I can get Robby to fix it.

[bk_forever]

Okay, thanks, I'll try importing just the entries, comments, and friends, since everything else looks okay. Um, probably a stupid question, but do I need to remain logged in to the journal I'm importing TO while the import is going? If the answer is yes, then that might be the reason it didn't work...

I'll give it another try shortly, just got to do something else first.

[denise]

Nope, you can log out, close the browser, do anything, it doesn't matter -- the job is running on our server end, not your computer!

Looks like it worked this time!

[badly_knitted]

I'm such a dunce when it comes to anything computery. I THOUGHT it was okay to log out, but I didn't risk it this time, just in case. Anyway, took less than 20 minutes, so I'm all backed up safely. Many thanks.

[denise]

Don't worry about it! it's not like staying logged in hurts anything, heh.

Glad that it worked this time! I still have no idea how your previous job got into the state it got into, lol.

[badly_knitted]

True!

It's fine, I was sure it would get sorted eventually. I probably should have said something sooner, but I had no idea how long it was supposed to take. I'm amazed it happened so quickly second time.

Your systems have been juggling so many imports recently it's not surprising if an occasional notification vanishes into the wilderness, but I'm all imported now, so I'm happy. Hopefully your workload will ease up a bit soon. You've all gone above and beyond for us, getting so much importing done in such a short time. It's seriously appreciated. Thank you.

[badly_knitted]

Worked this time! Thanks so much, you guys are the best!

[elena_paglia]

A heartfelt thanks from a newcomer (today!) From LJ: entries and comments imported in the blink of an eye!

[denise]

Glad to have you here! I hope you find the place cozy and comfortable. :)