Suggestion for the convertors

[qureshi]

SMF Version: SMF 1.1 RC2
Hi there,

Currently, the phpbb converter restarts the ID.MSG value starting from 0. This can be a problem.

A friend of mine converted from a huge phpbb forum, and it went fine and everyone is pleased with the change. However, his forum contained a lot of links to other threads inside his forum. Since the links where posted in a phpbb forum and to a phpbb forum, they where linking to the phpbb file viewtopic.php. Which you should know doesn't exist in smf. However I got around that problem by creating the file and programming it. (you can have the code from me if you want)

But in phpbb links you have a p value in the url when linking to an exact post. When my script converts old phpbb links to smf links it take the p value, looks up the database table with that ID.MSG, and copies that tables ID.TOPIC to the url. However, since the smf-convertor resets the ID.MSG, there is a chance it won't work:

Explanation:
Let say you had 4 posts in your phpbbforum in 2 differents threads:
post id 1 = topic id 1
post id 2 = topic id 1
post id 3 = topic id 2
post id 4 = topic id 2

Now, let's say you deleted post 1 for some reason. Your phpbb-database would now look like this
post id 2 = topic id 1
post id 3 = topic id 2
post id 4 = topic id 2

Now, let's say you convert to smf, It will reset it to:
post id 1 = topic id 1
post id 2 = topic id 2
post id 3 = topic id 2

notice how post number 2 is now in thread id 2, instead of number 1.

I would request that the smf convertor does not reset these values, but keep the same ones.

Btw, Thanks for the convertor, it worked perfectly when I tried it. My suggestion is just a tweak, not a correction of some sort :-)

Nadeem.