MyBB Community Forums

I'm possibly looking at merging a smaller, yet similar forum to mine soon, and have a few questions that I'd like to ask before going ahead with a merge this time;

1) merging a phpbb forum with a current and active mybb forum is perfectly fine, yes?

2) on the smaller forum I might be looking to merge and the currently active forum, some of the users are registered with the same username on both. will the merge hangup because of this? will it automatically merge the two usernames? if not, is there a query I can run to do this to prevent having to do each one manually?

3) is there some code or an .htaccess edit that will allow me to redirect all of the phpbb URLs to the new mybb URLs once the merge is performed? I know it's been said that this must be done before the merge ever takes place, so that's why I'm asking now, so that I can prepare for it to work if I end up merging the two forums.

1. Yes that is perfectly fine.

2. I don't believe so, as long as the User ID's are different, you will have to manually merge them.

3. I don't know about this one, but somebody else will!

(2011-10-24, 09:10 PM)Shemo Wrote: [ -> ]I'm possibly looking at merging a smaller, yet similar forum to mine soon, and have a few questions that I'd like to ask before going ahead with a merge this time;

I'll do my best to answer these

(2011-10-24, 09:10 PM)Shemo Wrote: [ -> ]1) merging a phpbb forum with a current and active mybb forum is perfectly fine, yes?

It should be. There is a known issue with phpBB3 BBCode->MyCodes, but I never got the answers I needed to fix it.
http://community.mybb.com/thread-106151.html

(2011-10-24, 09:10 PM)Shemo Wrote: [ -> ]2) on the smaller forum I might be looking to merge and the currently active forum, some of the users are registered with the same username on both. will the merge hangup because of this? will it automatically merge the two usernames? if not, is there a query I can run to do this to prevent having to do each one manually?

The merge system will combined the two users if the username and email are both exactly the same.

(2011-10-24, 09:10 PM)Shemo Wrote: [ -> ]3) is there some code or an .htaccess edit that will allow me to redirect all of the phpbb URLs to the new mybb URLs once the merge is performed? I know it's been said that this must be done before the merge ever takes place, so that's why I'm asking now, so that I can prepare for it to work if I end up merging the two forums.

The .htaccess edits must be done after. But will not work unless you keep the other forums' domain names anyways, since all links to them will be on their domain names. Then those domain names must contain a permanent redirect to your domain+forum+thread+post etc...

It gets complicated, and is something we wont support.