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Old Forum closing down, will archive include original database?
ChaseRLewis73003
New
A forum I visit regularly is closing and a few offshoots are looking to make a replacement. It was mentioned an archive of the site will be made, I was thinking of trying to migrate the old archive into the new forum with user accounts.
What exactly will an archive of a site entail? If the owner requested a copy of the original database would it be possible to get an early copy for testing compatibility before the site closes?
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@ChaseRLewis73003
Welcome to the community.
A Vanilla install is made up of:
a database (this is the bit you MUST have if you want to preserve threads/posts/users etc from the old forum. This is stored separately from the Vanilla folder/files.
the Vanilla files, representing whichever version has been installed. This may include a customised theme and/or plugins.
Vanilla files without the database, your forum is lost.
A database without the Vanilla files, you can have a working forum in about 5-10 minutes.
It would help you to know which version of Vanilla is currently being run.
Feel free to ask for help if you go ahead with this. Normally, it is a pretty straightforward process.
I understood it that way, that this old forum is "some forum" and it should be converted to Vanilla. So the question would be what would be needed to convert.
Yes, I think some more clarification could be helpful
Thanks guys, I just wanted to make sure an archive would include a working copy database I could have access to and potentially reassign admins on.
There are arguments within the community whether to stay with vanilla or attempt a migration. It still gets a 200-500 posts a day with over a million views a month. We aren't convinced its quite time to let it die.
I just wasn't sure if the archive would have a working copy of the database. If the owner reached out to vanilla would it be possible to get a database dump since they are using vanilla hosting currently?
OK, if it is Vanilla hosted, you would need to ask here
https://support.vanillaforums.com/
or get the current admin to contact Vanilla support.
From the FAQs, re data export,
I'm sure the Vanilla team would be helpful.
This forum only supports the self-hosted version (not because we're mean, just that we normally wouldn't know the answer...)
The hosted version has features that the open source forum has not. Therefore some functionality might be lost, maybe even some information from the past.
If your forum was using reactions, you most probably will loose that information. You could re-gain the feature with some application from the open source community, but the historical data will be lost if you are not having a good knowledge of SQL and it would take some time even if you are a SQL guru.
I think the hosted version has something like groups. There is nothing like that in the OS version.
And maybe even more features that I do not know of. I cannot imagine that you will be given the theme, although I maybe wrong. So maybe your forum will have complete different look.
But all in all transferring from hosted Vanilla to OS Vanilla should me way more easier to transfer from whatever Vanilla to whatever other forum script