Frankly, I’m just as surprised as you are…
I hadn’t exactly given up on getting my comments imported from LiveJournal after migrating the rest of the blog over last fall, but at the same time, it was kind of out of my hands unless I was willing to go under the hood myself…
…which I was actually thinking about doing, even though I really have no idea how that API even works…
…but luckily, I didn’t have to because out of the blue, I saw an update to the import plugin yesterday so I decided to give it another try, and low and behold, it actually started doing stuff when it got to the comment import portion!
Mind you, the importer ran and ran for a long time, which I know that it technically anticipates with a warning at the top for those who have lots of comments (mine allegedly has 802), but apparently part of it was because somehow I ended up importing a ton of duplicates that I later had to go back in and wipe out. Sorry … I didn’t save the exact query, but I used something along the lines of this to weed out the couple of thousand extras that piled up on a handful of posts.
(You also need to refresh the comment count afterwards because that’s actually stored at the post level, fyi…)
So anyways, I’m definitely happy that this is finally completely done … I honestly don’t get a ton of comments or anything, but having migrated everything else over I kinda felt bad that the comment section hadn’t followed with the rest of my earlier posts as originally intended. Now this is truly a full copy of my original blog that I started way back in 2003, so it makes me feel better to know that if LJ eventually does go completely under one day, I’ll still have a snapshot in its entirety of my early years of blogging! 😉
If you’ve been having issues on importing comments from LiveJournal to WordPress for the same reason, it might be worth updating to the latest version of the plugin (0.5, as of now) and giving it another shot. Of course, be sure to backup your database before kicking it off, but I didn’t get any duplication with the posts that I’d already pulled in – just some weirdness with duplicate comments that took maybe an hour or so afterwards to resolve.