Migrating Disqus

22nd Dec 2009 | Tags: blog

In changing this blog over to jekyll, my urls changed (there’s now a trailing slash). Easy enough to tell google about it, just set up redirects, but there’s no easy way to tell Disqus about it so my comments migrate over.

The good news is that it’s pretty straightforward using their API, the only bad news is that I can’t delete the new threads auto-generated for the new urls, so I’m just moving them out of the way.

I’m using the HTTParty gem to wrap API access, like so:

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require 'rubygems'
require 'httparty'
require 'json'

class Disqus
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'disqus.com'
  format :json

  def initialize(key, version='1.1')
    @key = key
    @version = version
  end

  def auth
    {:user_api_key => @key, :api_version => @version}
  end

  def get(action, opts={})
    result = self.class.get("/api/#{action}/", :query => opts.merge(auth))
    result["message"]
  end

  def post(action, opts={})
    result = self.class.post("/api/#{action}/", :body => opts.merge(auth).to_params)
    p result
    result["message"]
  end
end

Do note that I’m adding trailing slashes to the api calls to avoid a redirect. Doesn’t matter for the GET, but the redirect on POST was causing issues.

With this in hand, I’m grabbing my forum, looping through the threads, and renaming any that have comments (a whopping 3 of them).

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key = "secret" # get yours at http://disqus.com/api/get_my_key/
disqus = Disqus.new(key)

forum = disqus.get(:get_forum_list).first # I just have one
forum_api_key = disqus.get(:get_forum_api_key, :forum_id => forum["id"])

start = 0 # manual pagination, eww
loop do
  threads = disqus.get(:get_thread_list, :forum_id => forum["id"], :start => start)
  break if threads.empty?

  threads.each do |thread|
    posts = disqus.get(:get_thread_posts, :thread_id => thread["id"])
    next if !posts.empty?
    
    target_url = thread["url"]+"/"

    # There's another thread in the way...
    if other_thread = disqus.get(
      :get_thread_by_url, 
      :forum_api_key => forum_api_key,
      :url => target_url
    )
      # free up the url we want to use
      disqus.post(
        :update_thread,
        :forum_api_key => forum_api_key,
        :thread_id => other_thread["id"],
        :url => target_url + 'old'
      )
    end

    # update thread url
    disqus.post(
      :update_thread,
      :forum_api_key => forum_api_key,
      :thread_id => thread["id"],
      :url => target_url
    )
  end

  start += 25
end

Et voilà, old comments are in the right place now.