PHPbb to SMF -- Not converting all topics

[Omega X]

Like the title says. The converter is not converting over all Topics. The Stickied topics are not being converted and a number of Announcements also.

Furthermore, all of my users are Administrators and my Moderators and Admins are plain users. I can't get in to fix this since my account dosen't have the privelages.

Not to mention that the User registration dates are NOT being imported. Everyone is set at the year 1900.

Can someone help me with this?

[winnet]

for the first point:
try to search the topics who was sticky and announcement manually
the converter did not take the attributes, it convert all topics like normal ones; you should be able to found them, edit and provide them with sticky and or announc. attribute

I convert myself a phpBb forum about 100.000 posts and all goes well, users, private forums, permission, profiles, dates, etc.
try again, I tried 8 times until I succeed.

[Omega X]

That's NOT the case. The missing topics are NOT there. Either they were converted wrong or SMF will not recognize them. Either way, they are not visible on the Front End.

[Omega X]

I can now confirm that the convertor does NOT convert phpBB user Permissions over correctly. IT just copies them to the SMF members table.

However, I still don't have an explanation for the missing posts.

[Oldiesmann]

What happens if you click on "Find and Repair Errors" under "Forum Maintenance" in the admin center?

I don't know what to tell you about the dates.

[Omega X]

OK, It claims that it has found threads & messages with no poster attatched to them. I told it to fix them and now the post count is close to what it was before.

The Dates thing was because of the extra tables manipulated by the PHP-Nuke team. I did a conversion to phpBB standalone and then to SMF.

I still havent figured out the Administrators problem. ALSO because phpBB allows unusual characters in the user name, its probabaly creating errors.

I don't have enough MYSQL experience to write my own querys. Can anyone help me out? Please. If I don't get these problems fixed, I'm gonna have no other choice but to stick with phpBB.

[Oldiesmann]

I can help you out.

As far as the usernames are concerned - we have a couple of options here. We can either replace the strange characters with something else, or we can strip them out - your choice...

Admins - to make a user an adminsitrator:
Click on their username (to go to their profile).
Click on "Account Related Settings".
Under "Primary Group", select "Administrator".
Click "Update Profile".

[Omega X]

I know about those options BUT since I have about 500 members, that will take WEEKS to finish manually.

IS there some kind of SQL command that I can run to make this quick?

[[Unknown]]

What strange characters are you worried about?  Yes, it can be done quickly - but what exactly needs to be done quickly?

-[Unknown]

[Omega X]

Well I read in another thread about usernames having spaces and other certain characters could cause SMF to act weirdly. But I didn't find a way to fix it. Since my SQL knowledge is limited, I wouldn't know how to fix it other than a PHP script that someone else would have written.

[[Unknown]]

It should be fine.  Are you having any problems there, or are you just worried?

Some of the 1.0.x converters didn't do statistics right at the end.  Repairing and recounting will fix that.  I hope to have this completely resolved for 1.1.

It's also possible some of the topics may have been damaged in your phpBB database.

-[Unknown]

[Omega X]

It should be fine.  Are you having any problems there, or are you just worried?

Some of the 1.0.x converters didn't do statistics right at the end.  Repairing and recounting will fix that.  I hope to have this completely resolved for 1.1.

It's also possible some of the topics may have been damaged in your phpBB database.

-[Unknown]

I was just concerned that the names thing might mess something up.

Also I have no Idea if something is messed up in phpBB since there is no real way to tell that I know of. phpBB doesen't have a repair script like the great SMF.

[ediww]

2 days ago tried migration with phpbb2_to_smf.php. so far so good, sticky in phpbb are sticky in smf, but announcement was not converted as sticky.

by the way, so far the best convertor from phpbb (ipb and vb have more glitches). 450k+ messages in less than 10 hours (dual xeon 733 + 1g ram + scsi raid5, debian testing, apache1.xx).

if there was a way to do it not from the web server - something shell-like or even a win32 app which would work with sql dumps... but 10-12 hours of downtime is far too much. or maybe "incremental" install?

incremental - split the script, first import the users, then the threads/postings. i can stop for a day or two the new user's registration. and if i can prepare everything and switch quickly, having only to "fill up" the last day or two messages, it will be nice.

wwell edi
PS unknown, 1.1 version of the script or the board? when (if soon we may wait a little for the migration)
PS/2 great board. let's kill that blackhole phpbb2, we do already have a new king.

[wobo]

As for the time needed to convert, your estimation is far to high. I did the complete switch last Saturday with a phpBB database of 80K+ postings.

1. Installed SMF on new server at new hosting provider (old forum still alive)
2. Closing of old forum
3. Dumped phpBB database from old server of old hosting provider to local (5 min)
4. Uploaded old_phpBB.sql to new server (40 min, due to slow upload connection)
5. Used bigdump.php to build phpBB database with old data in the same database as smf (10 min)
6. Used the converter online to convert data from phpBB to smf (roughly 5 min)
7. Opening of new forum (if you don't care for permissions, etc.)

So the minimum time the forum was out of order was 60 min for 80K postings. Actually I used more than 120 minutes because I had trouble with permissions and groups. But the minimum time counted  for your database should be around 6-7 hours altogether. Faster if you have a faster upload connection than me (128KBit/s) and a faster server (plain 2.4 P4 with 80G IDE harddisk, 512M memory).

wobo

[ediww]

10x for the hardware hint, i got a p4/3.06/2g/(p) ata5 for the "server" - im using the dual xeon, which is p3/733 only for the conversion. maybe it will be wise if i do lock down the real host, and do the conversion right on site. no, it is not about the connection, lucikly, i do have a quite quick link to my hosting place - about 500-600 kbytes/s, so it is not a problem.

anyway, it seems that the cpu speed is most important in that case.

i will do some other tests.  the difference between

6. Used the converter online to convert data from phpBB to smf (roughly 5 min)

and more than 5 hours, NOT COUNTING sql imports et cetera, "pure" converter time... is far too big.

how big was the dump?
mine is around

gzip -l bgmamma-mysql-bgmamma-dump-20050504-0240-EEST.gz
         compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
          135603130           758994365  82.1% bgmamma-mysql-bgmamma-dump-20050504-0240-EEST

this is with incomplete search index (the problems forcing me to migrate was primairly the almost-not-functioning search system).

if anyone else have timings about migration on a know hardware, please, share

wwell edi

[ediww]

i can and will check the times again, tonite or at the weekend.

[wobo]

how big was the dump?
mine is around uncompressed  135603130
this is with incomplete search index (the problems forcing me to migrate was primairly the almost-not-functioning search system).

Ah! I did not dump any search related tables! That reduced my 190MB dump to a mere 120MB! You don't need those tables anyway when moving the database. It is even recommended to clean them out every now and then.

wobo

[ediww]

wobo,

i've edited my post after posting - uncompressed size is over 700 megs, w/io the search index. the index is huge, that's right, but in this archive there is no index file.

wwell edi

[jaijaymama]

I feel like such a newbie compared to you all. LOL

I tried to switch from phpBB to SMF and it wasn't working with the conversion tool. I had no access to my database(s), so I finally just gave up and switched hosts. Now - how do I take my phpbb database backup file (generated by phpBB) and put it into SMF?

Should I upload the data I downloaded from my previous installation of phpBB first, then install SMF and attempt the conversion again?

[wobo]

Did you do a complete dump of your phpBB database (with structure) ? If you are unsure, open the file of the dump and look, if it starts with "CREATE TABLE" (after some informational chitchat). If so, it is a complete dump.

All you have to do is upload the dump file to your new server (anywhere there) and create the phpBB tables IN THE SAME DATABASE as your smf tables. As most servers don't allow for doing this in one single command you may use some tool (like bigdump.php) for this.

After you have both, smf and phpBB in the same database, you can start the conversion tool. After that you can erase the phpBB tables.

Beware for one thing! If in your phpBB forum you have moved threads from one board to another and you left the hint in the old board about the movement, these placeholders will come up in SMF as empty threads with '-1' as number of replies. Search for this in the database and erase all lines with the '-1'. This kept me "searching for lost replies" for nearly 2 hours!

wobo