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Converting a decent decent sized vb 3.8.5 forum

Started by Bluedreams, January 03, 2015, 08:27:40 PM

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Bluedreams

I have a forum with 1.5 million posts, 1 GB database, has anyone successfully done a migration to SMF with something this large? I see posts with people saying they have databases < 100 megs!

margarett

In all honesty, there aren't that many persons with 1+ Million posts ;) Most forums out there our small to medium.

That being said, I successfully converted some vB forums through the years. Conversion is a heavy process on the server but, as long as it takes the "beating", you should have no bigger problems than you would have with a small forum. It just takes a heck lot more time :P
Se forem conduzir, não bebam. Se forem beber... CHAMEM-ME!!!! :D

QuoteOver 90% of all computer problems can be traced back to the interface between the keyboard and the chair

Antes

afaik vb 3.8 converter one of the most stable around. I did conversation years ago went so smooth.

Black Tiger

I agree with the above statements that it's the most stable convertor for converting vBulletin to a free forum software like SMF. Others (like phpbb and mybb) do mess things up and/or give various errors. SMF goes smooth.

However, it shold be mentioned that a lot of things are not converted which I found out the hard way. Some of them are present because of upgrades from older versions of vBulletin to newer versions (I had vBulletin for 14 years).

On my forums also (at least a lot of) birthday dates were not converted.
Internal links are also not converted this should be mentioned.

But you can do that manually after conversion via phpmyadmin or doing a search/replace on the database. These are some examples you should convert manually after doing the main conversion VB to SMF. They will fix the internal links.

Convert (depending on which versions of vbulletin you had, or just do them all, can't do any harm). If you change directory like from /forum/ (VB) to /board/ (SMF) you have to use these directory's in the below examples like this.
Threads:
/forum/showthread.php?t=
/forum/showthread.php?threadid=
/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=
to
/board/index.php?topic=


Do the same with the examples below.

Boards:
forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=
forumdisplay.php?f=
to
index.php?board=


Memberinfo:
member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=
to
index.php?action=profile;u=


Private messages:
private.php?s=
to
index.php?action=pm


What is still not converted?
1.) Showpost, internal links to specific posts in a thread. Example: showpost.php?p=188162&postcount=7.
You can only fix links to a main post.
showpost.php?p=
to
index.php?topic=


I hope you main find this helpfull. I converted 2 vBulletin 3.8.7 pl3 forums to SMF this year.
Greetings, Black Tiger

Bluedreams

So I ended up finally getting the conversion done after trimming the board down to 700K posts. Other than the feature losses, it went fine, for the most part!

It was not so obvious at first about setting the character set to match vB, and it kept failing on the poll conversion until I found a fix in a thread here.

When I'm more motivated I'll run some of the find and replace stuff in the previous post.

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