The triple merge has happened.
There are a lot of things to be fixed. Cursory check shows we have no media images before 2008. We have 575 posts that don’t have the author. All the draft posts show as published in 1970. Etc. I’m sure I will find many more things that aren’t quite right.
So here’s what we’re gonna do.
We are going to use the site as usual tonight and give the site developers / site hosts 2 options.
We can lose everything we do tonight (posts, comments, images etc) and go back to new-old Balloon Juice tomorrow, and we go through this whole process again at a later date, with the bugs worked out.
OR
We start using this as the mother ship, with everything imperfectly merged, and they agree to continue to do the cleanup so that we have everything back. To be completed within one month maximum. This will mean occasional downtime while they import media library etc.
So for now, this is Balloon Juice. We’ll know more tomorrow!
Update: all in all, merging the 3 sites was a massively complex job, and kudos for them for what they have accomplished.