Yabb 2.6.11 to SMF possible?

Started by lavoip, April 12, 2019, 12:01:06 PM

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lavoip

Hi,
I'm the administrator of an old YaBB forum.

The YaBB version is 2.6.11. It's almost the latest version of YaBB.
Our forum has 950 members with 33272 posts within 3905 topics.

Do you think it would be possible for us to upgrade it to SMF?
We saw converter progam here to do it but which one will be the good one.

If yes, what would be the step to do it? Any "How to" docs available already?

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

I would suggest you make a mirror of your install (or at least thorough backups of everything) and try the one on our download page https://download.simplemachines.org/index.php?converters;id=6
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

lavoip

Should we move the SMF 2.0.15 or SMF 2.1 RC2?

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

At this point I would say 2.0, and that is also the only converter now available. 2.0 can later be upgraded to 2.1.
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

lavoip

Does our server meet the requirement?

We are linux Apache 2.4.39
PHP version is 7.2.16
MySQL version is 10.2.23-MariaDB

Illori

SMF 2.0.* does not support php 7.2. you will need to downgrade to php 7.1.

lavoip

Well, host provider don't want to downgrade because it is shared host...

Does not support 7.2 ... does it mean that it will not work? Or it will work but you will not help with any future problem?

Illori

it will work but throw many errors in the error log.

GigaWatt

To explain on Illori's post a bit, those "errors" have nothing to do with the actual forum. They are "function depreciated" errors, which means that some of the functions that SMF uses (one in particular) will be removed in future versions of PHP, that's all.

And support by the team may be dropped only if you remove the SMF copyright in the footer or if you modify it. While dropping the whole copyright isn't illegal, the team has the right to deny support. On the other hand, modifying the copyright is actually illegal by the license SMF is currently published under.
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

lavoip

It is not our intention to remove any copyrights. We ran on Yabb for more then 10 years without any need to remove their so I don't see why we would do it with SMF.

My question about the support was more like are we going to live : "Huh! We cannot help you at all because this version is not supported. Bye."

The php version 7.2.16 is not supported right now but I guess it will at some point.
Should we go ahead and try to install SMF 2.0.15 with the YaBB converter?

Our plan for now is trying to upgrade our forum on a test plateform like XAMPP.
I already have XAMPP 7.1.28 which is php 7.1.28.
I will run our YaBB forum on it. Then I will install SMF 2.0.15 and try the YaBB converter.
If it work then we will do it on the live server.

How does it sound?

GigaWatt

Quote from: lavoip on April 15, 2019, 09:28:25 PM
The php version 7.2.16 is not supported right now but I guess it will at some point.
Should we go ahead and try to install SMF 2.0.15 with the YaBB converter?

See, that's another problem... don't know about this particular converter, but most converters were designed way back and don't know how updated they were, so the converter might not work with PHP 7.2 and you might have to roll back to 5.6 in order to do the conversion :-\. In general, it's preferred to do these types of things on older versions of PHP, since, as I said, most of them are pretty old.

There are cases which also require you to do the conversion to a lower version of SMF (say, 2.0.0) and then do a large upgrade, either to 2.0.10 and then to 2.0.15 or directly to 2.0.15. Conversion processes are tricky and rarely go without a glitch. Shuffling between PHP versions is a must in these cases.

If you absolutely have no choice and can't change hosting providers, I'd suggest using a free hosting provider, one that allows shuffling between PHP versions, just for the conversion. This of course depends on how willing you'd be to put that data on a free hosting provider, but, in most cases, you can delete the data after you're done with the conversion ;).

Quote from: lavoip on April 15, 2019, 09:28:25 PM
Our plan for now is trying to upgrade our forum on a test plateform like XAMPP.
I already have XAMPP 7.1.28 which is php 7.1.28.
I will run our YaBB forum on it. Then I will install SMF 2.0.15 and try the YaBB converter.
If it work then we will do it on the live server.

Just read this ;).

This is actually a good plan, convert the forum locally, then make it live ;). Of course, you'll still probably need to shuffle between PHP versions through the conversion process.

But, if you go live (production) with 2.0.15 installed, you'll probably have to empty the error log daily. This problem will probably be fixed in 2.0.16, but until then, you'll just have to live with this problem :-\.

On the other hand, 2.1 supports PHP 7.2 or higher out of the box. The problem is, it's still in RC, therefore, still not considered stable enough for production. So... I guess the question comes down to, are you willing to empty out error logs daily, or are you willing to try out 2.1 RC and preferably transfer to 2.1 Final when it gets releases.
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

lavoip

OK Here is what we did so far...

I installed XAMPP 5.6.39
I ran my current YaBB 2.6.11 forum on it.
I installed YaBB 2.4 then I downgrade my version 2.6.11 to 2.4. (basically copied boards, messages, members and attachments files to proper directory)
I did all maintenance control.
I installed SMF 1.1.14
I used the converter from https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=240334.msg4002547#msg4002547

So now I have my forum running somehow on SMF but with a lot of things that doesn't seem to be right.

All the boards are only visible when I logon. If I'm not logged then only 2 boards are visible... It was not behave like that on YaBB.

Seem that not all attachments was properly imported...

I ran into a lot of problem while converting.
I always got this error for the attachment:
SELECT command denied to user "@'localhost' for table 'smf_settings' with a warning from MySQL that a connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time....

I will try to add screenshot of errors and warnings tomorrow.


GigaWatt

Quote from: lavoip on April 28, 2019, 01:03:12 AM
All the boards are only visible when I logon. If I'm not logged then only 2 boards are visible...

The converter might have messed some things up or your setup might have been altered in a way that doesn't affect YaBB, but it does affect SMF.

Go to the Admin panel and see if some boards are set to hidden for guests. Unhide them if they're setup this way ;).

Quote from: lavoip on April 28, 2019, 01:03:12 AM
Seem that not all attachments was properly imported...

Yeah, something definitely went wrong during the conversion process :-\.

Out of curiosity, why didn't you use this upgrade package?

https://download.simplemachines.org/index.php?thanks;filename=smf_1-1-21_upgrade.zip

Quote from: lavoip on April 28, 2019, 01:03:12 AM
SELECT command denied to user "@'localhost' for table 'smf_settings' with a warning from MySQL that a connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time....

This is probably related to the server or the script... and is probably the reason why some boards are viewable for members only (not all settings got converted).
"This is really a generic concept about human thinking - when faced with large tasks we're naturally inclined to try to break them down into a bunch of smaller tasks that together make up the whole."

"A 500 error loosely translates to the webserver saying, "WTF?"..."

lavoip

Okay. Let's start from scratch!
I tried to take a shortcut by reading the most recent post about converting Yabb to SMF and tried to use this one. It's my mistake.

So I read all minimum requirements for different version of SMF and I made a table versus all the converters I found.
Here is my results:
      From Yabb version   To SMF version    PHP and MySql   XAMMP for
                                    In convert.php                             Windows
Official:
Yabbse   Yabb SE 1.5.x        2.0         4.1.0 - 4.0.18      

Yabb      Yabb 1 Gold           2.0         4.1.0 - 4.0.18   

Yabb2   Yabb 2                   2.0         4.1.0 - 4.0.18       5.5.19

Yabb21   Yabb 2.1              1.1         4.1.0 - 4.0.18      

Yabb22   Yabb 2.2              1.1         4.1.0 - 4.0.18   

From post:
Yabb24   Yabb 2.2              1.1         4.1.0 – 3.23.28   

Yabb24   Yabb 2.4              1.1         4.1.0 – 3.23.28

Based on that statement from the minimum requirements:
o   Versions of SMF below 2.0.7 will not work on PHP 5.5. If you use PHP 5.5 it is required to use SMF 2.0.7 or greater.
o   Versions of SMF 2.0.14 and higher will not work on PHP 5.3 or below. If you use PHP 5.3 it is required to upgrade to a newer version of PHP.

and because I only found only one XAMPP suitable version I will try the Yabb2 converter from the official download page.

So my next try will be:
XAMPP 5.5.19
Donwgrade Yabb 2.6.11 to Yabb 2
Install SMF 2.0.8
Use converter Yabb2

lavoip

It doesn't work at all.

Next try
XAMPP 5.5.19
Donwgrade Yabb 2.6.11 to Yabb 2.4 and remove RSS, allow all to all boards...and other tweak.
Install SMF 1.1.14
Use converter Yabb24

lavoip

Dawm! I always got this error:

SELECT command denied to user "@'localhost' for table 'smf_settings' with a warning from MySQL that a connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time....

The MySQL default user name is root without password with XAMPP. Do I need to change it?
What else it should be?

I'm able to do the conversion, I mean all boards,topics,members look like there but it's always the attachments that suck!

On my last try, the attachments was all there but 4 times, I mean if I have one attachment in a post then it was displayed 4 times!?

For your information...I'm just a regular user. I'm not an IT guy. I have no programmation knowledge. But I can read and follow instructions and also figure out how thing should work by myself. But now, I need a little help please. Thank.

lavoip


lavoip

OK, I tried again with XAMPP 5.6.39 with converter 2.4 to SMF 1.1.14.

Look like it work but I still got the attachment in three copy?

How can I remove the two extra copies?

lavoip

Does anyone of you has any success to convert attachements when more than 1 was allowed per posts?

justinbowser

I have also had a nightmare with attachments.  Missing attachments, dups, you name it.  Every time I ran the conversion I got different results.  So far, no help after multiple posts in various threads.  If you were ever able to get a successful attachment conversion please let me know how you did it.

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