Migrating from MyBB

meetdilip

Hi, there is a project I manage which could do well with a base like Vanilla Forums. It is currently running the latest MyBB 1.8. Is there any merge/import tool I can use so that I can keep the existing content as is and resume the journey ?

I have used Vanilla Forum before but not very recently. I am not looking for anything fancy. But a Like button, spam prevention like reCAPTCHA, and anti-bot and human spam deterrent tools will be great.

I would like to add that apart from English, I will be needing to handle Indian languages like Hindi. Thanks.

pitkmi

There's Porter for importing from other platforms:

https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/porter-core

No idea, how well it works, since I never quite got it working myself, but MyBB is listed as supported.

Like buttons (reactions) are part of the Core in 4.0 (currently RC1), apparently. There's also YAGA, if you need more comprehensive gamification, but make sure you use one of the newer forks. reCAPTCHA (v2 I think) is supported and there are a couple of anti-spam plugins in the Core (Akismet and StopForumSpam).

You can check out the available locales in the Addons section. Hindi is included, but it looks like they might all be a little out of date 🤔

meetdilip

Thanks. I will check the Porter. I will be happy to deal with English as board display language but allow users to use Indian languages provided through Google Translate and other means.

I hope that I could bring in the old data.

meetdilip

Can we add a custom.css through Admin Panel or similar to make visual changes on the front end ?

pitkmi

There's the CSSEdit addon:

https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/cssedit-plugin

meetdilip

The last update was in 2018 ? :(

K17

Yes because it didn't needed any updates yet. I use it and it works perfectly.

meetdilip

I was making a test install and I am got this error. I uploaded the zip directly and then extracted.

got it fixed by using " Show Hidden Files " in File Manager in cPanel.

There was a locale error for which I found this workaround this forum itself

meetdilip

The migration was more or less successful and my test board is working fine. Non-English characters were replaced by ????

Another error was when we switch to `Category` view, the listing shows

0 discussions 0 comments

for all boards. But when we move to `Discussion` listing, view count and comments count are working properly.

I wonder if there is any way to fix these.

Bleistivt

Non-English characters were replaced by ????

Check your database collation before exporting and importing. It should be utf8mb4_unicode_ci . If not, this can be changed in tools like phpmyadmin (or the command line).

Another error was when we switch to `Category` view, the listing shows 0 discussions 0 comments

Visit YOURFORUM.COM/dba/counts tick all boxes and click run, it should fix the counts.

meetdilip

Thanks. I did try /dba/counts before. But I didn't see the checkboxes and did not tick them. All good now. :)

I will try to change the database collation.

meetdilip

No luck with non Latin characters. Could it be related to setting

$displayName = "English";

which helps overcome the PHP intl extension not available ?

meetdilip

I talked to the hosting support. They say

The database is in utf8mb4__unicode_ci, however, it appears that the website itself is in utf8 (for example, bootstrap.php has "->addCall('setMeta', ['CONTENT_TYPE', 'application/json; charset=utf-8']"). I am not sure whether it is possible to change the encoding there to match the encoding from the database.

Bleistivt

This is all as it should be. Don't change anything in Vanilla.

This is most likely a problem with your export. Do you still have the export file or the original databse?

meetdilip

Yes, I changed the original MyBB database to utf8mb4_unicode_ci and did a fresh export using export2vanilla.php. I still have the export file. Thanks.

Bleistivt

Yes, I changed the original MyBB database to utf8mb4_unicode_ci

You may also need to change the collation of the individual tables.

Unzip a copy of the export an check if the characters are readable by opening the file with a text editor.

Edit: It may also help if the MyBB board is UTF-8 in the first place: https://docs.mybb.com/1.8/administration/utf-8-setup/

meetdilip

>You may also need to change the collation of the individual tables.

I think I did that too. It was an option when I tried to change the database collation to utf8mb4_uicode_ci

Unzip a copy of the export an check if the characters are readable by opening the file with a text editor.

Sure, will do that

Update: Checked the exported file. It has all Indic language characters as question marks

>It may also help if the MyBB board is UTF-8 in the first place: https://docs.mybb.com/1.8/administration/utf-8-setup/

I will try converting MyBB board to UTF-8

meetdilip

Checked the config.php file in MyBB installation. It is already

$config['database']['encoding'] = 'utf8';

Bleistivt

The MyBB documentation says "Now that’s done, you can continue to run the UTF-8 tools in the ACP". So apparently changing just the config is not enough.

meetdilip

I will check, thanks.

meetdilip

Update: Everything looks good. All the items in Admin Panel for MyBB are ticked green for tables. I tried a fresh export but that had the question marks instead of indic characters.