MyBB Community Forums

Hi all,

New to MyBB and how it works. I volunteered to take on the setting up of a forum, which I thought would best be served by MyBB, judging by reviews. We've recently been made homeless from an IPB-based forum and the admin there only provided an SQL dump of the forum (so there are SQL files for votes, forums, users, posts and topics, respectively).

The Merge tool only appears to work on live sites, from what I can see. Unfortunately, our old home has been taken offline. I thought that the next best thing might be to set up a DB on our new server and import each SQL dump to that DB. Each dump is represented as a table in the DB. I tried to run the Merge tool and pointed it towards the DB with the imported data in, but the Merge tool just says that it can't find an IPB forum on the server. I'm now at a loss as to how I can restore our community's user accounts, forums and posts etc. Is this at all possible - in an easy-to-do way - in our current circumstances?

you can use localhost (eg. XAMPP) in your computer and use the merge system.
later you can import the converted database to the live MyBB forum.

I don't quite understand what you mean. How would that resolve the problem of Merge telling me it can't find the IPB database?

^ I assumed that you have all the tables of IPB forum and you can import all of them into a database.
And you can use that final database (consisting of all tables) for the MyBB merge system to convert to MyBB.

You should be able to run the merge system with just the database, as you described - the site doesn't need to be live. Which version of IPB is the database from?

Hi,

Thanks for the replies so far.

To the best of my knowledge, it's from IPB v2.3 (the latest one I think, without checking?).

As we don't have an IPB licence or software, all I've done is import the SQL into a DB of the same name that it had previously, and attempted a merge from there.

This is the particular message I'm given after trying to run Merge with the settings provided to it:

The Invision Power Board 2 database could not be found in 'DB name'.

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Just found out that IPB is on 3.x, so I guess that's why we can't use the Merge feature. I should have done my homework!

Try this: http://community.mybb.com/thread-138553-...#pid999540