Looking for successful migration from phpBB2 to Vanilla2

candyman

Like subject, I'm looking for people who have successfully migrate from phpBB2 to Vanilla2.
I'm trying to migrate a forum with more than 100000 messages and I still have to solve some problems concerning:

- problem with "quotes of quotes";
- problem with posts written by deleted users;
- problem to translate some BBcoded posts in HTML (not all the BBcode prefixes are understood).

An exchange of experiences would be very useful for me.
Thanks in advance.

Todd

We did an ~600K phpBB 2 import for a client recently. Here are a few things I discovered.

1. The original phpBB2 exporter did have issues which I had to go through. It should be okay now.

2. Any forum that wants to make heavy use of BBCode really needs the nbbc plugin. This should clear up your "quotes of quotes" and other bbcode issues.

3. I don't think the posts written by deleted users has been dealt with. If you want to help with that maybe you can pinpoint the db column that flags a deleted user so I can check things out.

Todd

We did an ~600K phpBB 2 import for a client recently. Here are a few things I discovered.

1. The original phpBB2 exporter did have issues which I had to go through. It should be okay now.

2. Any forum that wants to make heavy use of BBCode really needs the nbbc plugin. This should clear up your "quotes of quotes" and other bbcode issues.

3. I don't think the posts written by deleted users has been dealt with. If you want to help with that maybe you can pinpoint the db column that flags a deleted user so I can check things out.

candyman

Many thanks Todd.

1. I've tried the migration some time ago: didn't know that the exporter has been updated!

2. Didn't know about the nbbc plugin: I'll give a try. Anyway, before uploading the posts_table I could translate the BBcode tags into HTML (for example changing [ b ] into < b > and so on...): this could be useful according to you (I mean for future upgrades, speed, security and so on...)? If I've understood well, actually, only one formatting language is supported at one time (bbcode or HTML). My users are used with BBcode but Vanilla2 standard is HTML and, I suppose, there's a reson for that...

3. Tell me what I have to do. Actually I'm looking for a command to restore deleted users in phpBB before starting the exporter engine.

And, a couple of things:

4. with the updated exporter the phpBB passwords are converted?

5. Some URLs of converted forums?

Thank for your help: I hope to complete the migration and be useful for other people have the same problems.

candyman

6. I was forgetting about the poll migration problem.

boyzforum

Vanilla recently helped us migrate our 8-year-old, large forum site from phpbb2 to their servers as part of a managed convert and install package. Vanilla's support has been fantastic overall.
- Initially there were problems with quotes and other bbcode tags not being transcribed properly, but as @Todd says, they have resolved the issue now.
(Note : I am informed that Vanilla's WYSIWYG posting tool is not usable if you have legacy bbcode).
- There was no member loss or password loss. Old members are able to login with their old password.
- I'm not sure what happened with deleted users' accounts/ posts, since they were not important for us. Similarly with polls.
- Roles, category permissions, and moderation settings had to be re-setup from scratch.
- Don't forget to assign a Member role to all users as default. Ours came blank and therefore no one could log in at first!
- File uploads : images and other user files uploaded to the old server were not ported over to the new install, therefore resulting in dead image links.
- No default support for avatars, member rank badges, or signatures in Vanilla.
- Only real disappointment has been significant loss of posts from the old site, including some crucial stuff such as member blog posts and story chapters. I am informed they are looking into this issue.

You can see our new site at boyzforum.vanillaforums.com, which I believe is a normal install of Vanilla with some bells and whistles we added using the Messages tool. Our old site is no longer online.
HTH

candyman

Thank boyzforum, I appreciate your experience but (probably due to my poor
English) some things are not clear...


- I'm going to migrate on a independent domain but I think that's
make no difference with Vanilla servers: the software is the same,
isn't it?
- what do you mean with "legacy BBcode"?
- I think it's better to leave the original posts as they are with
all standards BBcode tags insted of converting all to HTML: what do you mean? What you did with your forum?
- I decided to resume deleted users before moving to Vanilla to
avoid the anonymous posts problem;

Anyway there's another important problem to solve.
Unfortunately (from the migrator point of view) my community make a
large use of internal self-referring URLs. I mean: if one user refers
to another discussion he inserts a clickable link that points to that
thread.
Unfortunately the URLs scheme of phpBB is quite different from the
Vanilla's one: how can I convert tons of...

http://myforum.ext/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=579376

into...

http://myforum.ext/discussion/16558/looking-for-successful-URLs-migration-from-phpbb2-to-vanilla2#

?!? Searching&correcting everything it would be extremely frustrating.

Thanks in advance!

shozen1

succesful migration as far as forum posts go - but now none of my users can log in and thats after changing their permissions - even a password rest does not work.