Migrating legacy boards
Retros from the older ScatterSpoke come across to the new platform with their cards, columns, votes, and comments. Most of it lands unchanged. A few things do not, and they’re worth knowing about before you go looking for them.
Your columns come with the board
Section titled “Your columns come with the board”This is the important reassurance. A migrated board keeps its own columns, exactly as they were named on the old platform — including columns from a format your workspace customised.
What changes is only their colour. Legacy columns carried no colour of their own, so migrated columns are coloured by position from a fixed palette. Order and titles are untouched.
Migrated columns also have no prompt lines under their headers. The old platform had no per-column hint to bring across.
Formats are matched, not recreated
Section titled “Formats are matched, not recreated”Every board also records the format it was built from, and the old platform’s format names are matched onto the new catalogue.
Most map straight across: DAKI, 5 Whys, Good bad and the ugly, Hot Air Balloon, Lean Coffee, Like Wish & Wonder, Loss Gain Pleasure Pain, Pre-Mortem, Speedcar, Starfish, Three Little Pigs, Tree, WARP, and Custom are all present here under the same names. Mad / Sad / Glad, 4 Ls, and Sailboat match the versions the new platform already shipped.
Two are near-matches rather than exact ones:
| Legacy format | Becomes |
|---|---|
| Plus / Minus | What went well / What didn’t / Ideas |
Because the migrated board keeps its own columns regardless, a near-match doesn’t change what your board looks like. The format name only affects what Run it again starts you from.
Two formats do not survive
Section titled “Two formats do not survive”Ishikawa Fishbone and Spider Web were diagram canvases, not column boards. There is no equivalent on the new platform, and their layout does not migrate.
Boards built from them resolve to the generic Custom format. Their cards come across, but the spatial arrangement that carried the meaning — the fishbone’s spine and branches, the radar’s axes — does not. On a fishbone board, which bone a card sat on is not recoverable from the migrated data.
If you have historical boards of either kind that matter, take a screenshot of them on the old platform before you rely on the migrated version.
Anything else unmatched — a workspace-specific format that was never ported — also resolves to Custom.
Cards that contained images
Section titled “Cards that contained images”The old platform had no media field on a card, so people pasted GIF and image URLs straight into the card text. Those cards would otherwise arrive as walls of URL.
The new board reads them: a pasted image URL renders as the image inline, and any other URL renders as a link. Nothing about the stored text changed — it’s the rendering that caught up. See Cards, columns, votes, and comments.
Phases don’t map one to one
Section titled “Phases don’t map one to one”The old platform ran more phases than this one does. The new guided flow is three: Feedback → Vote → Review. There is no separate grouping phase and no separate discussion phase.
Grouping is now AI theme clustering — something you ask for and get back, rather than a phase you spend fifteen minutes in. Discussion happens on the Review spotlight.
A migrated board is a closed record, so this affects the retros you run next rather than the ones you brought with you.
Action items are not a separate object
Section titled “Action items are not a separate object”The old platform tracked action items as their own thing, with a resolve state and a list to work through.
The new retro board has no action-item object. Decisions live in the comment thread on the card they came from, and the closed retro’s summary is where you go back to them. If your team relied on the old action-item list, that workflow needs somewhere else to live — a tracker, or a standing card on the next board.
Reopening a migrated retro
Section titled “Reopening a migrated retro”Migrated retros arrive closed. A workspace admin can reopen one — nobody else sees the control. See Closing a retro.
Boards with no format on record
Section titled “Boards with no format on record”Some older boards have no format recorded at all. They work normally; the only difference is Run it again on their summary, which sends you to the templates gallery to pick a format instead of pre-selecting one.