Please upgrade here. These earlier versions are no longer being updated and have security issues.
HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.
Vanilla Importer: Phorum
Hi folks - killing myself here, but I've had a Phorum message board for 5-6 years and have had to move the database to a new host. I was all ready to upgrade to Vanilla, unfortunately Phorum isn't included as an option for the Vanilla Importer. I'm wondering if there is any groundswell support to include Phorum in the importer or if anyone has found a solution to porting a Phorum database to Vanilla. If not I'll have to stick with Phorum, and I'm very fond of Vanilla! Thanks.
0
Answers
We usually program a porter if a customer requests it or if a significant number of people request one. The porter system is relatively simple to extend yourself if you want to do the programming.
grep is your friend.
Can anyone provide details on how the import file should be formatted? This should at least make it possible for me write my data to a format the Vanilla importer can understand. I've dug through some of the sample export files to try to reverse-engineer a DTD.
A thorough DTD for the import format might be very useful information for those who are using unsupported forums like Phorum.
I feel the groundswell...
There was an error rendering this rich post.
The benefit of this approach is that I can use ANY email based discussion to populate my forum. The most annoying issue, however, is dealing with "Reply-to" content embedded in each message. Non-standard HTML or Encoding can be problematic as well. I end up doing a lot of cleanup to make the messages readable.
If you run your own ListServ or SMTP server, you can also set up an SMTP trap that snags and stores messages as they come through.
All of these techniques are a bit of a kludge, but I'm hoping Vanilla will help make it an elegant kludge!
Email me your contact information to editor@PaperlessCockpit.com, and I'll be happy to discuss some of the challenges I've faced, and those that I'm still trying to overcome.
This is an ancient thread but the topic is still relevant to some. I need to move 20,000 posts from phorum to vanilla.
This is ugly but SMF has a converter for phorum.
Then SMF -> phpbb -> Vanilla .... is at least theoretically possible. This would probably end up taking a whole day. But I have a hunch it would work.
20,000 posts combined with phorum's lack of phone support makes it worth a try.
You can at least skip the SMF to phpBB step, since the Vanilla porter directly supports importing SMF forums
If you wanna email me a database dump (lincoln at vanillaforums dot com), we might be able to create one. I'm not sure it'd be fast enough for you, but it'd help the next person along.
If you do: You can blank/replace the emails before sending. We'd appreciate if you sent us at least 1 valid/working password in the database (including telling us what it is) so we can validate a working password migration too. The rest could be blanked as well. In any case, we'll destroy or anonymize the data when we're done.
A couple years back, as an experiment, I used the Phorum->SMF->Vanilla workflow and it went much smoother than I expected. Sorry, don't recall what, if any, snags occurred. Maybe I don't recall any snags because there weren't any?