2014-11-30, 08:40 PM
First let me say; "Hat's off to the developers of MyBB!!!" In my experience this has got to be one of the slickest discussion forum software alive. I've been moderating forums since 1988 pre-WWW. I've been through most of them, USENET, eGroups(Now Yahoo Groups), vBulletin, Invision ... well, you get the idea, this ain't my first rodeo. 
Also, it is not my intent to slight or insult the development team, so if my comments come across in any other way, that is not what I want to convey. Please assume that this is intended to offer my unsuccessful experience with converting IPB 3.4.7 to MyBB.
In 2006, the private community I administer, decided to migrate to Invision Power Boards. At the time IPB 2.x was very slick. In fact, MyBB reminds me a lot of IPB 2.x in terms that it appears to be developed by Admins for Admins.
In 2009 IPS force-fed an upgrade to our community that we neither wanted nor liked. But we were forced to accept it. This past month, IPS has made changes to our service which have rendered it unacceptable to my community. It's apparent that their notion of customer service follows in the footsteps of companies such as Apple and Microsoft who bully their customers. In other words, "You'll do it our way or the high way". So we are forced to make a change we would rather not.
We've never looked for a handout. I wish there was a paid version of MyBB or at least some service that we could pay for to convert our IPB board flawlessly. After all, we have paid Invision $20/mo plus $50/year for hosting for the last 8 years. It has never been about the money.
This week I experimented with migrating our IPB forum to MyBB. The results were disastrous. Don't get me wrong, the migration utility is as slick as the board itself but it only gets us to 80% and that just won't cut it for my community. Here are the things that break and break really, really bad:
![[Image: 4a8dc2367930722.jpg]](https://camo.mybb.com/075319f5fe63a9b0d4016eb3d3c012af87635461/687474703a2f2f7468756d626e61696c733131322e696d61676562616d2e636f6d2f33363739342f3461386463323336373933303732322e6a7067)
There is a whole host of other items that also do not convert. As an example, User Groups convert but not their permission. WTF??? Customer fields that we depend on in profiles also are ignored despite the fact that this feature is also supported on MyBB.
Like I said we aren't looking for a freebie. If anyone knows of a paid board that will convert IPB flawlessly, we'd like to know what that is. We are considering Xenforo but they have a very short track record without a legacy of success in IPB conversion.
Any suggestions would be welcomed.
Also, it is not my intent to slight or insult the development team, so if my comments come across in any other way, that is not what I want to convey. Please assume that this is intended to offer my unsuccessful experience with converting IPB 3.4.7 to MyBB.
In 2006, the private community I administer, decided to migrate to Invision Power Boards. At the time IPB 2.x was very slick. In fact, MyBB reminds me a lot of IPB 2.x in terms that it appears to be developed by Admins for Admins.
In 2009 IPS force-fed an upgrade to our community that we neither wanted nor liked. But we were forced to accept it. This past month, IPS has made changes to our service which have rendered it unacceptable to my community. It's apparent that their notion of customer service follows in the footsteps of companies such as Apple and Microsoft who bully their customers. In other words, "You'll do it our way or the high way". So we are forced to make a change we would rather not.
We've never looked for a handout. I wish there was a paid version of MyBB or at least some service that we could pay for to convert our IPB board flawlessly. After all, we have paid Invision $20/mo plus $50/year for hosting for the last 8 years. It has never been about the money.
This week I experimented with migrating our IPB forum to MyBB. The results were disastrous. Don't get me wrong, the migration utility is as slick as the board itself but it only gets us to 80% and that just won't cut it for my community. Here are the things that break and break really, really bad:
- Previously quoted text from a prior posts don't convert. It's like the conversion utility only goes one layer and then gives up. The Raw HTML is visible in the post but is not converted.
- Links back to posts on our board are not even attempted to convert. That would be OK because we could probably do a global search and replace but unfortunately, the thread reference number does not convert either.
- Hyperlinks are randomly converted. We may intense use of Imagebam, imgbox and other image hosting site to host images. Some links work, most do not and for the life of me, I cannot detect a pattern, it appears random.
- UTF8 conversion is flawed. We get extra line feeds and this annoying random character(click on thumbnail below for a screengrab example.
There is a whole host of other items that also do not convert. As an example, User Groups convert but not their permission. WTF??? Customer fields that we depend on in profiles also are ignored despite the fact that this feature is also supported on MyBB.
Like I said we aren't looking for a freebie. If anyone knows of a paid board that will convert IPB flawlessly, we'd like to know what that is. We are considering Xenforo but they have a very short track record without a legacy of success in IPB conversion.
Any suggestions would be welcomed.
