One importer per forum, reading your live data
Jetonomy does not ask you to export a file and hope the columns line up. It ships three importers, one each for bbPress, wpForo, and Asgaros Forum, and each one reads directly from that plugin’s own database tables. You keep the old forum active while the import runs, and Jetonomy pulls your content across in place.
The mapping is what you would expect. Your old forums become Jetonomy spaces, topics become posts, and replies become replies. bbPress sticky topics become pinned posts, and user accounts link to the existing WordPress users they already belong to, matched by ID, so nobody has to re-register. The Import screen shows a live count of what each source contains before you commit, so you can confirm Jetonomy sees your data first.
Browser for small, WP-CLI for large
You can run any import two ways. The browser importer under Jetonomy then Import gives you a live progress bar and a five-step tracker, and it is the simplest choice for small to medium communities under roughly 50,000 topics and replies. Its one risk on a big database is a browser or server timeout part-way through.
For large communities, run the import from the command line with WP-CLI, which has no browser timeout to worry about. Before the real run, a dry run with the —dry-run flag executes the full import logic without writing a single row and reports the imported, skipped, and error totals it would have produced, so you can validate the migration as many times as you like. If a browser import does stop, the card shows an “Import Interrupted” badge and offers Resume Import to pick up from the last completed batch.
What crosses, and what to do about the rest
An honest migration names its gaps. The importers bring your forums, topics, replies, sticky flags, and user links. They do not bring topic tags, old reputation counts, subscriptions, private messages, or moderator assignments. bbPress’s nested reply threading is flattened, because every Jetonomy reply attaches to the topic rather than to another reply, so the conversation stays intact even though the tree does not.
After any import there is a short checklist: confirm your spaces match your old forums, open a few posts to check the content came across, re-assign Space Moderator roles by hand, and flush permalinks if a new space returns a 404. Only re-import a source if the first run had a real problem, because re-importing creates duplicate content rather than detecting what is already there. Once everything checks out, you can deactivate the old forum plugin for good.