Topic: Import selected forums from phpbb

[mrwienh]

Hi,

I have an old phpbb forum which contains some posts I'd like to import to our new SMF forums as an archive. For this I would need a converter that only imports the postings (from a specific board in phpbb) and imports them into a specific board in our SMF forums. We don't need the old users, only the postings (user can be set to a specified user e.g.)

Is this at all possible? If not, do you have any recommendations as to alternatives?

Thanks!

[Antes]

Converters' main action is converting complete system, your request is much more complicated because you don't need users, polls etc... also you need some topics which converters not allow us to choose import part(s).

If you edit converter to just convert topics / messages it may harm your database because of duplicated IDs, or some of your topics will be changed with old topics.
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Suggestion: Convert you whole site into new (untouched) SMF database then (you need to have knowledge about phpmyadmin / sql tables etc...) then clean topics which you are not going to use,
or you can clean your old phpbb forum (i mean deleting topics which you are not going to use), then convert to SMF (don't forget untouched new db - not your running db). Then you need to change all topic/message IDs...

This is bit tricky and contains some risks too.

[mrwienh]

Thanks for your quick reply!

Yes, I was afraid that this was out of the scope of the standard converter. Just to clarify, you suggest the following:

- Convert the old phpbb forum to a fresh smf install
- Prune the converted forum for unneeded threads (or clean the phpbb prior to conversion)
- Do the following per direct access to the DB:
-- change user IDs of all posts to an existing user in the target SMF
-- import all posts/threads directly via sql import to the target SMF

correct?

I do have some experience with DBs, is this a simple case of inserting the topics into the correct tables (using correct forum ids for the new forum) or will there be man other tables in the db that will need updating as well (like in linked info, that is need)

[Antes]

Well yes pretty much but needs more & deep planing