transferring current talk pages to liquid threads?
I have nothing to do with the redesign, but going by my own experience with programming I don't think there will be a way to switch over existing discussions to this format, it would be more effort than it's worth in my opinion. However if I'm understanding things right existing pages would still be able to use this format, the liquid threads section will just appear below the existing talk part, then as the existing discussion gets older and moved to an archive page all that would be left is the liquid thread part.
At least that's how i understand it, I could be totally wrong
Yes, it's unlikely that there will be an automated migration path for old talk pages. It's a difficult problem to solve correctly.
Thanks - I noticed in what I am typing now that I can edit the signature, so technically someone could come in and recreate the conversation if they really wanted to save it and not just archive it, so that ability to edit the username will still exist in the new version, right?
On Commons there is a bot which keeps an index of the current discussions, containing items of the form
[[PageName#SectionName|SectionName]] on [[PageName]]. Last comment by [[User:Name|Name]] on Timestamp.
The Python script used by the bot reads each page which should be indexed and do some kind of regex-based parsing to get the sections and comments in those discussion pages, being able to determine the title, section, user and timestamp of each comment.
Maybe the script could be adapted so that the info above could be used to save the page in the LQT format. Such an script could be added to the Pywikipediabot for easy use in other projects.
Just my two cents...
