Various errors with conversion from phpBB3 (3.0.13) to SMF

[13685]

Hi all - first post.

I admin a moderately-sized existing phpBB3 forum (a litte over 3,000 posts, no mods other than a few template tweaks), which I've been meaning to try converting to SMF for a while as I've come to really enjoy the interface of other SMF forums of which I'm a member, and just found a free evening tonight. So, I've just downloaded a copy of SMF and the phpBB3 converter, gone through the process of creating a fresh SMF install and then converting using the converter. Both processes ran flawlessly and completed correctly.

However, on going to access the SMF board, there seem to have been quite a lot of small but silly bugs with the conversion, most of which seem like they should be easily fixable.

Firstly, on first logging into the board as the sole admin account (the same username and password was used for the initial install of SMF as the one now imported from phpBB), I found that I had no admin options whatsoever, or indeed any permissions at all!

After a quick forum search here, I found this was fixable by simply switching the user type in the database over to "1", which worked fine (although of course it really would have been better had it not happened in the first place!)

But a lot of the data from the board seems to have become corrupted in the conversion process:

• BBCode for some links in user signatures has been broken, with some tags having an extra "]" appended to them (and thereby breaking the tag functionality, of course).
• The first half of the tags for some BBCode links in forum signatures seem to have disappeared entirely?
• In various places, font sizes changed with BBCode have been rendered massively out of their original proportion.
• Forum names and descriptions containing apostrophes seem to have been incorrectly escaped so that they all come out with an erroneous backslash, and some other punctuation characters seem to have been converted to HTML entities. Easy enough to go through and fix manually, but a bit of a nuisance.
• Some BBCode seems to have been appended with odd strings, for example: "[center:lsj3wse9][/center:lsj3wse9]".
• Images attached to posts seem to have disappeared.
• Images displayed inline in posts just simply no longer display?
• Every post now seems to inexplicably have a line at the bottom saying that it was last edited by a guest in the 1970s!
• Although I initially had no admin rights, one other user did initially have admin rights on the board, which seems like a potential security risk if it were to go unspotted!

These are just the things I've noticed on a cursory examination, so there are very possibly some further bugs I've not spotted yet, but even just this little list makes it impossible for me to convert the board to SMF without a lot of additional tweaking and manual database editing.

So my question is: is there an updated/fixed version of the converter available somewhere that I can use? And if not, is an update planned anytime soon? I'd very much like to move over to SMF, and I'm quite happy to deal with manually changing settings which simply don't translate between the two systems (permissions, custom user groups, custom emoticons and so on), but if the basic user and post data itself isn't converting across correctly, I just don't think it's feasible to convert at the moment. 

Thanks in advance for any help, anyway.

Ryan

PS: Just an additional unrelated note: the captcha images in use on this forum are almost unreadable to my (quite human, non-spamming) eyes, so I'm now on my fifth or sixth attempt to post this. Ah well, here I go again...

[margarett]

Hi and welcome to SMF
Sorry about the captcha, it's really a PITA...

Which converter did you use, the one from our downloads page?
There are weird things there. Keep your phpBB forum running while we investigate the conversion. There are usually some... Issues in conversions. But some of these are plain weird and I would like to follow up

[13685]

Thanks for the response.

And yep, this was using the phpBB3-SMF converter found here: http://download.simplemachines.org/?converters;software=phpbb - I downloaded the tar.gz package, I think (the tar.bz2 archive fails to open in 7-Zip for some reason?)

I'll stick to the working phpBB3 installation for now, of course - but if the issues were fixed, it would be great to move over to SMF.

Ryan

[margarett]

Thank you for your input. I'll be downloading phpBB3 to my localhost and try the converter myself

[13685]

Okay, thanks.

Just a quick update from me: a little further searching of this board and I've found a few threads which seem to include fixes for a couple of these issues, but it does seem that they shouldn't happen in the first place, ideally.

Anyway, I've just tried again (with a fresh attempt, having deleted andre-uploaded all files, deleted all SMF tables from the DB and reinstalled SMF first) using the alternate conversion script found here: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=508551.0

However, this simply failed on the conversion itself at the first step, with the following error:

Converting ranks... Unsuccessful!
This query:

    DELETE FROM `db`.smf_membergroups
    WHERE groupName LIKE 'phpBB %';

Caused the error:

    Unknown column 'groupName' in 'where clause'

Not sure what the problem there might be, but in any case, it seems that the best thing would be for the main official download to get everything right in the first place.

Ryan

PS: Second attempt to get past this captcha...

[margarett]

Yeah, that topic you mentioned has important fixes but it seems it was developed with 1.1.x database column names that's why it fails. So don't use that.

[margarett]

Try the attached converter

[13685]

Thanks! I'll give this a go as soon as I get a chance (probably in the next day or two).

Ryan

[13685]

Okay, so just ran the conversion with the script above, and it completed without failing, but sadly seems to have the same errors as before in the converted content.

Two other little (somewhat less important, but probably worth mentioning) things I noticed:

• The board name doesn't seem to be converted across using the converter, and neither do some directly-translatable board settings (such as maximum signature-length). It seems that the name of the community, at least, should certainly be moved over.
• It's valid to use BBCode in forum descriptions in phpBB, but apparently not in SMF, although it does seem valid to use HTML. Perhaps the converter should translate BBCode links etc. in forum descriptions to HTML? In any case, what it currently does is to break the BBCode by adding strings of nonsense to the tags, as in point 5 in my original post, and it certainly shouldn't do that.

Anyway, it seems that as phpBB is a very widely-used forum system, it would be great to get the SMF converter working properly.

Ryan

[margarett]

Hi.

Thank you for trying. I'm guessing that you must have some "non-standard" things in phpBB because you mention some things I've never actually see before...

Some notes on your issues:

BBCode for some links in user signatures has been broken, with some tags having an extra "]" appended to them (and thereby breaking the tag functionality, of course).

This is not supposed to happen. I think that the URL BBC is the same between SMF and phpBB so it should come along straight. I would need you to check your original members table and let me know what's there for one of these "damaged" link

The first half of the tags for some BBCode links in forum signatures seem to have disappeared entirely?

Same as above

In various places, font sizes changed with BBCode have been rendered massively out of their original proportion.

This is known. The font BBC is different and, IIRC, this is not handled by the converter. You can try this MOD, that should allow to recognize phpBB's font sizes

Forum names and descriptions containing apostrophes seem to have been incorrectly escaped so that they all come out with an erroneous backslash, and some other punctuation characters seem to have been converted to HTML entities.

The first bit should be fixed in the converter you used last. The lastest one not but I assume you used different collations between SMF and phpBB? Try the maintenance task in SMF to convert HTML entities.

Some BBCode seems to have been appended with odd strings, for example: "[center:lsj3wse9][/center:lsj3wse9]"

I installed phpBB yesterday and it seems it doesn't even have "center" tag? Again, I would need you to tell me how does it look in phpBB's database

Images attached to posts seem to have disappeared.

Not supposed to happen... Are you sure that the original file was still available? The converter checks if the file is available and only if the copy is successful, the entry is added to the database. Try SMF's "Attachments File Maintenance"

Images displayed inline in posts just simply no longer display?

SMF doesn't support inline attachments out of the box. This post by dougiefresh might help you around that although the fix he suggests is *not* added to the current converter...

Every post now seems to inexplicably have a line at the bottom saying that it was last edited by a guest in the 1970s!

No idea about that one That information is retrived by SMF from the smf_messages table, columns "modified_time" and "modified_name". Modified time comes from "post_edit_time" (in phpBB's database) so if no one edited, there should be a 0 there...

Although I initially had no admin rights, one other user did initially have admin rights on the board, which seems like a potential security risk if it were to go unspotted!

Again, that shouldn't really happen...

The board name doesn't seem to be converted across using the converter, and neither do some directly-translatable board settings (such as maximum signature-length). It seems that the name of the community, at least, should certainly be moved over.

Sorry, this never really happened in any SMF converter that I remember... I'm not saying you're not right, I'm just saying that it was always like this...

It's valid to use BBCode in forum descriptions in phpBB, but apparently not in SMF, although it does seem valid to use HTML.

You are right about that one. Board descriptions are passed pretty much straight on

Code Select Expand

$row['name'] = str_replace('\n', '<br />', $row['name']);
So we just replace "\n" with "<br />", which does not cause the issues you're having. Again, I suspect of an issue pretty much related to different collations...

On a final note: the current converters schema is pretty much "as-is". We are working in a new kind of converters that would be hopefully easier to maintain in the long run.
This means that I can help you (or anyone in need of course) on a "per-case" basis but there will not be a massive fix of the current converters...

[13685]

Thank you for trying.

Thank you for trying to help.

I'm guessing that you must have some "non-standard" things in phpBB because you mention some things I've never actually see before...

Not really - there are no mods installed, although there are a few additional smileys, custom ranks and so on added through the usual admin interface. The "center" BBCode tag is just a custom BBCode added via the custom BBCodes admin page, but the bug noted also affects standard BBCodes.

Every post now seems to inexplicably have a line at the bottom saying that it was last edited by a guest in the 1970s!

No idea about that one That information is retrived by SMF from the smf_messages table, columns "modified_time" and "modified_name". Modified time comes from "post_edit_time" (in phpBB's database) so if no one edited, there should be a 0 there...

I did come across another thread while searching on this forum from somebody who had the same problem (although in their case the edit date was in the 60s rather than the 70s!), so it does seem that it is a previously-reported issue.

Although I initially had no admin rights, one other user did initially have admin rights on the board, which seems like a potential security risk if it were to go unspotted!

Again, that shouldn't really happen...

I didn't check if another user had gained admin rights when trying your script, but it certainly still removed my own, as it had previously. I wonder if it's something to do with trying to transfer existing permissions to the new system? phpBB has quite a complex permissions system, so maybe this is something that the converter struggles with in forums which aren't using the default settings? One thing that it did do, for example, was to copy over stock permissions groups from phpBB as user groups (all prepended with "phpBB" in their titles), even though they no longer had any real relevance to the SMF permissions system (on an unrelated note, it also created user groups from the custom titles set in phpBB, which I don't think is necessarily the most relevant approach, as SMF also seems to support custom forum titles anyway?)

This is obviously a tricky thing to translate, as specific user rights and their interactions vary massively between different forum systems. I'm not sure what the best solution would be, but perhaps simply not copying across permissions other than giving full admin rights to the main admin account (and standard user rights to all the other registered users other than phpBB's built-in bot accounts etc.) would be a good option to include? Re-selecting users to be moderators etc. wouldn't be a huge amount of work for most forums, I'd think, compared to the possibility of having to individually check every user in case of erroneous permissions being granted.

Personally, I'd quite happily go through all the admin options and permissions in SMF once converted, and set everything up as I would if it were a new board - even re-creating all the custom ranks and so on if necessary - but I'd really want all of the existing posts and users to be copied across correctly at least. I'd happily use a converter which just copied those things across and left me to sort the rest out myself, if the converter had checkboxes to select which data would be converted.

It's valid to use BBCode in forum descriptions in phpBB, but apparently not in SMF, although it does seem valid to use HTML.

Again, I suspect of an issue pretty much related to different collations...

All existing tables in the DB in use are set to UTF-8 (bin), as are both the phpBB and SMF installations in their settings.

On a final note: the current converters schema is pretty much "as-is". We are working in a new kind of converters that would be hopefully easier to maintain in the long run.

Perhaps I should update to the new phpBB3.1 release for now and wait for the new converters to be available before switching, then? Are the new converters anywhere near to completion at the moment, or still in early development?

Ryan