[SMF Converter] Invisionfree/ActiveBoards/iPBfree

[ABCDiamond]

Is it possible to create a new smiley set, using the ones we have on IF/Zeta, and importing that to take advantage of the smiley codes on all the posts ?

[nneonneo]

@ABCDiamond: Yes, that should work.

[Enders]

@Enders: Some converters don't convert the smileys. Which one are you using?

ipbfree to smf

[nneonneo]

From the instructions (note 2nd point):

In your IF control panel, Board Settings, change each of these settings to "No":
Do you wish to view members signatures when reading topics?   
Do you wish to view images in posts, such as smilies and posted images?   
Do you wish to view members avatars when reading topics?   
Do you wish to get a pop up notification when you get a new personal message?   
Open Fast Reply automatically when available? *

See if that helps.

[tanshin]

Hi there! Do you know how this works with SMF 2.0 RC2?

[kherezae]

Hi there! Do you know how this works with SMF 2.0 RC2?

I tried it; didn't work.  I ended up installing 1.1.11 (or whatever), doing this, and then upgrading to RC2, which seems to be working fine so far, EXCEPT:

--

I'm having trouble with the PM passwords script.  It says it can't find the auth key.  Anyone have any idea why?

[tanshin]

That's what I ended up doing as well.

I did not have that issue with my PM script though...

[Dangerosking]

Thanks! You're awesome! Finally I know how to go from zetaboards to phpBB!

I've done the step one and im getting an error when I run the zetaboards_get_cookie.py script. The thing closes up. So I ran the command in a cmd window and i get:
File "[where the scripts are]\Board Converter\Converters\Zetaboards\zewtaboards_get_cookie.py"
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "[where the scripts are]\Board Converter\Conveters\Zetaboards\zetaboards_get_cookie.py", line 5 in <module>
from settings import *
File "[where the scripts are]\Board Converter\Conveters\Zetaboards\settings.py", line 55
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe1' in file [where my script is]\Board Converter\Conveters\Zetaboards\settings.py on line 55, but no encoding declared; see hxxp:python.org/peps/pep-0263.html [nonactive] for details

Might this have to do with that I'm using python version 2.6.4? Is there anything I can do?

[nneonneo]

The problem is that there is a non-ASCII character in settings.py; in Python, using non-ASCII characters requires an encoding to be specified.

To specify the encoding, on the second line of settings.py (right under #!/usr/bin/python) add this line:

Code Select Expand

# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-

replacing iso-8859-1 with your text encoding if you know it (iso-8859-1 is default, but you should also try utf-8 if it doesn't work).

[Dangerosking]

Thanks a lot man, the coding thing worked
I've done everything fine untill step 4. I went to the database and executed categories_forums.sql but I get an error saying the table categories does not exist... which is true... there is no table categories...
I think this is probably beacause im using the version 3.0.6? Should I install an older version? Or should I skip the lines that refer to the categories table and then reorder the forums manually in the admin cp?

[nneonneo]

The ZetaBoards converter only converts to phpBB2; you'll have to install that, import the .SQL files, then upgrade to phpBB3.

[Dangerosking]

Thanks a lot for all your help but I think Im gonna start over. After days of working with phpBB and zetaboards I've decided to start off from zero. After all my board doesn't have that many members or posts so it's not that important. I wish I had known more about web hosting before I started my board so I would have chosen to host my board in my own server instead of a free server.
Lol I tryed everything to upgrade from phpBB2 to phpBB3, but I get tons of errors, can't log in the admin cp, etc.
Anyway, thanks again for everything, you're awesome!

[donw9876]

This is a continuation of some posts I made on an older thread about Yuku conversion.

So far, I have gotten quite far in a conversion. Forums and messages are getting converted properly and I have gotten them to display in a test SMF forum I set up.

Now, here's the one sticking point: the member list is not being converted. (So, everyone is shown on every converted SMF post as "guest".)

I tracked down an issue where the domainstats/activemembers URL was not being served by my Yuku forum. That was actually an admin feature I had to turn on. So now the script is getting these pages (I see them downloading while the script runs).

The script members_topics_posts_smf.py is apparently failing to parse any users or user attributes out of these pages (or maybe it's just on my Yuku board - I notice that another Yuku board doesn't show member titles but mine does.)

I'm kinda thinking that the regular expression at "member_search" in the script doesn't work with my board's member list. I played with the expression in a text editor that has Unix regular expression support and this regular expression only works on my member list up to the expression:

<tr class="(?:even|odd) ([^ ]+)

If I add any more of the original expression from the script, it fails and doesn't match anything in a sample memberlist page.

nneonneo, if you want to look at this problem, I can PM you with the URL of my board and you can try it for yourself.

Thanks!

[nneonneo]

Yes, I can see the problem.

It appears that Yuku has stopped putting the forum title and forum position (Admin, Owner, etc.) on the memberlist page (at least, I wasn't able to find it on my test board).

I've attached an updated version of the Yuku converter. Try it out and see if it helps.

[donw9876]

Hi, nneonneo,

It worked! I had started on modifying your regular expression, but my regexes are pretty rusty and I don't know much Python.

The conversion seems to be perfect - members that I randomly checked were imported correctly with the right join dates and post counts, and even their avatars made it through OK.

I want to say that this is a great piece of work. I have been struggling to liberate my message board from Yuku for several years, and every attempt crashed and burned for lack of time. The straw that broke the camel's back was the idiotic Yuku video ads being inserted inline in our page views. Some of our members don't have the skills to troubleshoot Adblock Plus to remove the ads, and we weren't about to pay Yuku to remove the ads. We don't even see our board get indexed by Google. Yuku has really limited our board's potential and your script has made a move possible. Finally we can do this.

Thanks very much for putting this tool in the hands of the public.

[donw9876]

Everything works great now for a trial run I did. I have members exported and I have tested the script with two small forums on my board.

I want to export the entire board. We have 139,000 total posts (as reported by Yuku) scattered into about 8 main forums. The biggest forum on my board has 853 threads and 7824 individual posts.

I have two concerns now:

One is that the export process is an "all at once" operation, and Yuku will throttle the export and thus the export operation will never be allowed to complete because it gets throttled in the middle.

A second concern is string capacity. I don't know Python but it looks like you have several places in the script where you download multiple pages together, paste them into one big string variable, and then split the data out with regexe's. My concern here is that my board will blow up the script.

Note - I have had these downloads get throttled by Yuku at times. And I have not seen any string operation blow up (IE, cause Python to barf because of an unrealistically large string.)

I am doing this downloading on a Windows 7 PC with 12 GB of memory, and I believe that I installed the AMD64/Win64 port of Python. I will be doing the downloading on a residential DSL connection. The DSL is no problem, I regularly download 2+ GB ISOs. My concern, again, is that Yuku may shut me out.

Please let me know what you think.  Or maybe someone else who has imported a large Yuku board can advise.

Thanks.

[nneonneo]

Concern #1: If a single page fails to download, the script will retry up to 10 times at 5 second intervals; all of this is controlled in common.py. If you want to add a delay to every HTTP request, you can edit common.py:
Change

Code Select Expand

            printline(progressline)
to

Code Select Expand

            printline(progressline+"Waiting for 1 second between downloads...")
            sleep(1)
This will make the process take a lot longer, but should prevent Yuku from throttling you.

Concern #2: Python doesn't barf on long strings (strings as long as 100MB have worked fine). However, reducing the amount of data processed is still desirable. The easiest way to do this is to set the topics per page and posts per page settings as high as they will go in Yuku. This reduces the number of pages downloaded -- it reduces the amount of extraneous (non-post) data downloaded, as well as reducing the number of requests made.

For the record: the largest board I've personally converted on Yuku had 95000 posts in 16000 topics. It took about 5 hours to convert, and the result was 51MB of SQL.

[donw9876]

Thank you again. Do you have a tip jar somewhere? This is a heck of a piece of work.

I will check in when I have something new to report. It sounds like I will be considerably above your previous record in terms of volume of posts.

[nneonneo]

I accept PayPal donations at nneonneo(at)gmail(dot)com.

[donw9876]

... now the forums don't get parsed. The script apparently doesn't see any forums, so it doesn't download anything, and the set of boards that I was seeing in the file categories_forums_smf.sql is not present now.

Update: It appears that the cookie provided by Yuku gets invalidated if a client logs in again from a different location to the same Yuku ID/user name. The cookie that has to be manually copied to the settings.py probably gets invalidated. That's what seemed to account for not seeing any message sections.