This is a FR that is generated due to the tech support request found here:

http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/63392/

Basically, if you had multiple sites in one install of EE WITHOUT the MSM, and you buy the MSM and migrate those multiple sites into their own MSM sites, you LOSE YOUR COMMENTS.

I’m surprised this still hasn’t been added. How can this not be seen as a serious flaw? If you were running EE with multiple sites before (without the MSM I mean), and you switch to MSM so that you can continue to get official support for multiple sites, isn’t it OBVIOUS that you would want your comments to carry over?

Is there ONE web publisher on Earth who would RATHER have their comments just fall by the wayside instead of carrying over with the blog post?

I mean, yeah, a FR can be requested (as I have done here) - but if this isn’t a bug, it is a MAJOR MAJOR oversight. Let’s call a spade a spade here. The fact that I brought this up almost a year ago, had to pay someone to come up with a manual kludgey solution (on top of the MSM fee), and it still hasn’t been addressed - that concerns me a bit as someone whose business completely depends on EE and the MSM in particular.

Hey, I still love you guys and the product, but this is a big one.

I was very surprised to hear about this issue. I would take carrying comments by duplicating a site for granted. Luckily i just moved two sites without a huge amount of comments…

I was told to do a Feature Request due to this technical support thread:
http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/63392/

I’m running several sites with EE since EE 1.0 with tons of comments and I’m VERY surprised that this problems is named a “missing feature” instead of a BUG in MSM.

The original thread is closed now, so I even can’t ask the community if the given workaround (3 SQL queries) solves the problem under all circumstances. Thank you for that.

I totally agree with ‘drusoicy’ ... I love EE but leaving users alone with the problem (by calling this a missing feature for 8 months now) is VERY BAD.

djesse,

We are the site that used that SQL query workaround, and it did work. It just sucked that something that really is a no-brainer when paying for the MSM (and I bought a bunch of MSM licenses, so it was expensive) was something that I had to pay ON TOP of the cost to have someone come up with for me.

I would have thought that my original support thread would have spawned an “Oh crap! We forgot that? Let’s fix that immediately!” response, instead of an “It’s just a missing feature, so submit a feature request and we will consider it” response.

We’ve been fortunate that most MSM users who have used this feature don’t run blogs or other sites where the comment module is employed, so the number of affected users is small, but the impact for the affected users is great.  So I feel your frustrations, enough that I’m working on a holiday to address it.

The reason for lack of inclusion of this ability was one strictly of performance.  Importing is not as much of a big deal - simple UPDATE query.  Duplication though can get rough, and quickly.  Users on shared hosting environments were already having memory and script execution time problems when duplicating sites without adding potentially thousands of additional queries to the action.  I’ve made an implementation which will hopefully skirt the time issue, though memory will still likely be a problem that we cannot avoid in many environments.

If one or more of you kind users would like to test this on a large, real data set, please email me via my profile page.  It will be helpful to have a few more data points in various environments that I do not myself have ready access to.  Since so much data is being bandied about and timeout or memory limits could occur, testing should only take place on development sites of non-public data, i.e. a backup or reproduction of your live site, something that will be of no consequence to restore if something breaks.

Thanks Derek for your fast response! Take a look at your inbox.

Derek Jones - 04 July 2008 03:22 PM

We’ve been fortunate that most MSM users who have used this feature don’t run blogs or other sites where the comment module is employed, so the number of affected users is small, but the impact for the affected users is great.

Raises hand. I cost me a few hours (starting at midnight) fixing this the hard way for one of my MSM installs—by basically running the workaround queries with pencil and paper and updating the comments one by one. I had the added complication that new comments had already been entered and I felt it was safer to plod along.

If one or more of you kind users would like to test this on a large, real data set, please email me via my profile page.  It will be helpful to have a few more data points in various environments that I do not myself have ready access to.  Since so much data is being bandied about and timeout or memory limits could occur, testing should only take place on development sites of non-public data, i.e. a backup or reproduction of your live site, something that will be of no consequence to restore if something breaks.

I don’t know if I still have backups of the pre-MSM sites. In any case, it’s not that large a data set and I run my own severely underutilized server and neither performance nor memory limits are a concern to me.

I actually still have a need for this, but don’t have a duplicate setup to test with - but DO let me know when the functionality is there, because we need to get the last of our “old way” of doing multiple sites split out into the actual MSM.

It’s there, Dru, working fine on my test environments, and both Sven and Dirk’s live environments.  Email me if you’d like the files, as I’m not sure of a date for release.

Oh, nice! Emailing now.