However one of my tickets were responded to recently tho I don't remember by whom. They said something about someone starting work on the importer again.

And yes, all of the above was covered with many emails to the Staff on what blew up, so they are aware of at least some of the issues.

And so it will probably NEVER be fixed.

How would anyone know who is affected? Both by the number of people posting in the forums as well as Support tickets opened.

I guess it is about priorities or at least the squeaky wheel principle. Right now there's a problem affecting inserting images, which I think in anyone's book would be right at the top of the fix list.

How would anyone know who is affected? I for one am not going to publish a broken dual media site so that someone will know the import is broken.
Most people are not stopped dead in their tracks because they cannot use the import. Others will give up and go elsewhere.

(FWIW-It seems there may have been a confusion as to what the OP was trying to do. S/He was exporting from com to org, not the other way around.)

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/import-issue-from-31-rc2-hosted-version?replies=12

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/wordpress-import-creates-duplicate-images?replies=2

http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/duplicate-image-files-in-media-library?replies=6

What I would find helpful is what you mentioned above, being able to change the blog's address to one you already have registered rather than taking a risk that the name you want isn't available. Regardless, you pointed out that you encountered problems with the change blog address option as well.

About moving from WordPress.org to a WordPress.com site, I have a niggling memory of someone suggesting rolling back their org installation to 3.0 and then doing the export. I do not recall if this solved the problems that were encountered.

I have several sites to move back to wordpress.COM for someone who is wanting to simplify their online existence, and I've put them off till this is fixed. I haven't looked at the dev track, but I expect it is probably slated for the next core update, which would be 3.1.2. No telling when that will be out though.

Contact staff about it at http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/ .

So the question is:

Is it
- infrequent thus not important, or
- not show stopping (in the sense no data is lost in the original) thus not important, or
- people try this and give up, thus core team doesn't think it's widespread

Support staff have tried the imports, they get the same issues, so it really is a bug that needs to be fixed.

I am hoping this will show up in search now as a known issue, and others affected can add their thoughts and then we can see how many members are 'affected' and whether this should stay at the bottom of the list forever.

Contact staff and see if they can do the import for you. They have more tools at their disposal.

@jennifer, thanks for correcting me.

iliodos' states above the export/import is wordpress.com to wordpress.com

You can also see this problem every time a new theme is introduced. Look at the new theme's demo site's Gallery post where all the images have been doubled.

To make a long story short, it is apparent they are aware of the problem.

Are you by chance importing from a self-hosted blog?

If so there is a workaround that will take care of virtually all the issues.

1) they never get back
2) it was/is/never will be(?) fixed

The support team fully understands and has reproduced the error, and passed it on to the appropriate team

Obviously the bug report has been tagged 'minor' or they just can't be bothered, after all it's not like a blogger user can't migrate to WP. Unless they think there's a chance a WP user may migrate elsewhere due to these bugs, maybe nobody will bother to move?

It took them under a week to introduce the domain name change feature, maybe this bug just isn't interesting? Firefox etc also suffer from boring bugs being left behind while fun new stuff are done in a snap.

Situation:

Export WP blog to xml, selecting all options.
Open new WP blog, import xml, selecting all options.

Example:

original: testsinglepost2.wordpress.com
new: testsinglepost.wordpress.com

Expected:

New WP blog should be identical to old

Issues:

* post featured image - not preserved, deleted
* gallery image captions - not preserved, deleted
* gallery image alt text, etc - not preserved, reset to post title (not slug)
* gallery image order - randomized
* gallery images are doubled. a post with 1 image will become a post with 2 images. however as above the order is randomized making it impossible to manually delete half the images

* inline images - randomly linked to old post - see testsinglepost.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/test-post-for-transfer/
the inline image points to the original link. strangely the alt text is preserved here.

* Note that in the media library, all the new images are now named "Test post for transfer", making sorting or searching impossible

* links to other posts are also randomly linked to old post or changed to the new, there is no way to predict which it will be.

Conclusion:

As a programmer myself, 80% of these look like simple fixes, it shouldn't take someone working on the code more than 2 days to fix them up. As a person who has waited for over 6mths, I've considered hand editing everything from scratch, but deleting half of 2000photos and reordering/recaptioning them sounds stupid even for me.

Addendum:

After a few mails with support, they introduced the domain name change feature. However this also had a few of the same issues, and after a few tests I wasn't confident enough to risk losing any data to a one-way operation.

Also, the domain name change does not allow you to move to a WP.com name that you already own, which rules out everyone who tried the import already and found it broken.