Suggestions/help with Papermod as forum archive.

[tetricky]

I am new to both Hugo and Papermod (ergo, I don't really know what I'm doing). I'm running hugo from a docker container (klakegg/hugo 0.107.0-ext), under podman, locally (for development, before deploying to a podman server/domain setup).

I have a ten year old community forum, which I am wanting to archive before starting a new board. It has in excess of 2000 topics (which translate as posts in hugo), and many tens of thousands of posts (translating to sub-headings within those hugo posts) spread amongst those topics (hugo posts).

I want to create a static site, with search, that archives that forum for the community members, as we move to a new forum.

I have some bash scripts that scrape the site, and convert it to multiple (2391) markdown files with a title denoted by a heading, and users posts within that topic (posts). The markdown files are in the form:

## **The All New Forum** 
--------------------------------------------------------------

Home =\> Board =\> Topic started by: user on Month DD, YYYY, HH:MM:SS

Title: **The All New Forum**   
### **admin** on **Month DD, YYYY, HH:MM:SS**

Welcome all to the new board.  
We tried to restore the previous version, but after many hours of effort
it became clear that it was unlikely to happen anytime soon.  
Another problem was that we attempted to hack the metadata to fix it,
but even if this worked it would have left us vulnerable to future
crashes and upgrade issues. So apologies for losing many years of
nonsense (with the odd good) posts, but it's time to start afresh.  
The All New Forum is now open!

Title: **RE: The All New Forum**   
### **user** on **Month DD, YYYY, HH:MM:SS**

Oh no, not this again....

Title: **RE: The All New Forum**   
### **anotheruser** on **Month DD, YYYY, HH:MM:SS**

Can I have my tea?

......etc.

If I put these into posts, and build the site it's tantalisingly close to being useful. Barring some problems - the posts have no title/header (but do display a summary), and the search is clinically slow (several minutes for each letter typed), and eventually displays matches that are just blank boxes (but do link to matched posts).

It's not really functional in this form.

I tried adding headers to the markdown files (I am expecting that you will tell me that this is quite stupid, and not how it works, but it was my best guess on what I could find out).

These were in the form:

---
title: "topic-0001"
summary: "The All New Forum"
author: "admin"
date: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ
series: [Forum]
tags: [topic]
draft: false
weight: 3
---

...but I got various yaml errors and it wouldn't build (does the config file have to be configured to read the header?).

I feel like this is a good possible fit for what I want to do, but I've stumbled into a dark hole of lack of understanding and knowledge, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of documentation on importing large numbers of files into hugo/papermod (if it's even possible).

Any suggestions, observations, or help, would be appreciated.

[tetricky]

I've given up pushing this particular boulder uphill, and am now using raneto, which is a better fit for my particular use case.