Migration playbooks

Move your community without losing your members.

Migration is mostly a project-management problem, not a technical one. These playbooks cover what Mobieus migrates for you, what you need to handle, and what changes for your members at cutover. The two newest tracks — Facebook groups and self-hosted forums — are at the top. Paid-platform playbooks (Circle, Skool, Mighty) are below, unchanged.

From a Facebook group

Honest: there's no real export. You bring the members.

Facebook does not give group admins a usable export. You cannot pull old posts with attribution and authorship. You cannot pull member email addresses (because Facebook never gave them to you in the first place). The migration is not a copy of history; it is a relocation of the people. Done well, it works.

1. Announce the move with weeks of lead time

Pin a post at the top of the group. Explain why you're leaving (algorithm reach, ownership, mobieusMarket, whatever your real reason is). Give a date. Repeat the announcement weekly.

2. Stand up your Mobieus tenant in parallel

Pro tier, your custom domain, your branding, your forum structure. Seed it with the categories that mirror what your group actually talked about — not the categories Facebook gave you, the ones your members actually used.

3. Collect emails through the join flow

You don't have member emails. The only way to get them is to ask. Run a "claim your seat" form on Mobieus or a simple landing page that captures email + Facebook display name. Members who care will sign up.

4. Re-post the canonical threads

You cannot import history. You can manually re-post the 5–20 most valuable evergreen threads in their new forum homes, with the original author's name credited in the post. That seeds the new forum with content that feels familiar.

5. Keep the Facebook group as a referral funnel

Do not delete it. Pin a sticky linking to the Mobieus community. New people who land in the group from search get pointed to the real one.

6. Run a "first 90 days" engagement push

Daily welcome posts, weekly summary, member-of-the-week. The AI Community Manager (Creator Plus and up) drafts these for approval. The goal is to make the new place feel inhabited within the first month.

What to expect. A reasonable benchmark is 30–60% of active group members sign up within 60 days, with most of the rest never moving. The members who do come are the ones who actually engage; the trade is fewer accounts for a denser community.

From a self-hosted forum

phpBB, vBulletin, XenForo. What maps, what changes, what to test.

If you run a self-hosted forum, you have something Facebook group admins don't: a real database. The migration is mostly a mapping job. Here is what carries over cleanly, what changes shape, and what you need to test before launch.

What maps cleanly

Users (with email + display name + signup date), forum categories → Mobieus categories, threads → threads, posts → posts, basic permissions (member / moderator / admin), avatars and signatures.

What changes shape

Plug-in features (custom BBcode, badges, awards) get translated to native Mobieus equivalents or dropped if they have no analogue. Private messages migrate as DMs in mobieusCore. Attachments move into the Mobieus file library; permission models map to per-forum file permissions.

What you need to handle yourself

If you ran a classifieds plug-in, those listings map into mobieusMarket but you'll want to set verification levels, listing fees, and category rules at cutover (not just inherit defaults). If you ran custom theming, you rebuild it in Mobieus admin branding.

What to test before launch

Member login flow (passwords don't transfer; members reset on first login). URL redirects from the old forum so search-engine rankings transfer. A representative sample of attachments to confirm the file library preserves them at the right URLs.

What does not migrate

Custom plug-ins you wrote. Custom server-side cron jobs. Anything that wasn't standard forum behavior. If you have a feature that matters and isn't in Mobieus, the public REST API + webhooks let you keep it running externally and tie it back in.

What you gain

The ops burden goes to zero. No more patching your forum every Tuesday because of a CVE. No more sysadmin time. The marketplace, help desk, LMS, and wiki are bundled. If you've been running phpBB + a classifieds plug-in + a help-desk SaaS, you collapse three subscriptions into one.

From a paid platform

If you're coming from Circle, Skool, or Mighty.

The original platform-specific playbooks are intact. Pick the one you're leaving.

The shared playbook

What every migration looks like.

The platforms differ; the migration shape does not. Plan for these six steps regardless of where you are coming from.

1. Inventory

List your spaces/topics/categories, member roles, paid memberships, courses, files, and any external integrations you depend on.

2. Map

Spaces → forums. Members → users. Subscriptions → Stripe (you connect your own). Courses → mobieusLearn (SCORM if applicable).

3. Stage

Spin up a Pro or Creator Plus trial. Import a representative slice. Set up your domain, branding, and forums.

4. Cutover plan

Announce date. Freeze new sign-ups on old platform. Move active subscriptions to your Stripe. Send members a one-page guide.

5. Day-of

DNS flip. Members log in via Mobieus. We provide a same-day on-call slot during cutover for Creator Plus and Sovereign tenants.

6. Post-cutover

Two weeks of monitoring. Help desk on standby. Members get a follow-up email so anyone who missed cutover finds their way in.

Start when you are ready

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