MyBB Community Forums

Greetings fine sirs,

I am thankful for your effort in providing the fine piece of software that MyBB seems to be.
I need to make a harsh critic to the merge system, however. Please don't take any of it offensively, instead, I hope you use this to improve future versions.

Firstly, I haven't ever used MyBB prior to this.
In my attempt to convert my existing phpbb3 board to mybb, I was quite shocked upon finding out that after the conversion was done, all of my forums were wide open for everyone, including guests, to see. All of it. Every private subforum I had, which were sprecifically configured for only a handful of people/groups access, due to it's sensitive and secretive nature, were open for even bots to index.

This is strawberry insane.

I did run every import modules, all of which were apparently successful, and in no step or documentation I was warned that my information would be made wide open. Rather, by importing all the permissions, I was tricked into believing they would be set as supposed to be, or, at the worst case scenario, all permissions would be lost and hence nothing in the board would be visible.

All I could do was nuke my database as soon as I noticed this, and can only hope my information hasn't leaked.
Needless to say I do not intend to ever again come anywhere near MyBB.

ps: ah yeah, it's worth mentioning there's something broken regarding users as well, since every post on the forum looked to be from Guests. Again, I'm sure I ran every module successfully.

Ok, first: this isn't related to the software itself, all of this are issues with the merge system.
Second: You shouldn't do the merge "live", instead you should do it locally or in a private subdirectory. After the merge you should always check the merged information as not every information can be merged over (eg the permission doesn't exist in mybb).

Now the issues themselves:
Missing names: you could try this code changes, that should fix it. I've never seen anything else which could cause this.

About the permissions: It's likely caused bythis issues. Forumpermissions are only merged for custom groups. I can provide you a temporary fix if you want to test it again.

Both issues will be fixed in the next version btw