MyBB Community Forums

So I just did a test conversion of our current vBulletin 3.5.1 forum over to MyBB. Most everything went fine. There were a few warnings during the posts, to do with some deprecated functions that were being replaced, but no failures at all were reported.

Details:

vB 3.5.1 to MyBB 1.8
Windows 2012R2, IIS 8.5, PHP 7, MySQL 5.7.16

- The issue is that everything seems to have come over fine except there are no thread titles displayed

- The posts are all there and look fine as best I can tell. I can get to them either via the Pages: links or the 'last post' link, and the ones I've looked at all look fine.
- And it correctly shows the thread creator's user name on each thread
- Forum titles and the posts are there just fine, so there's obviously nothing wrong with the text conversion in general
- If I make a new post the title is there, so it's obviously a conversion error, not a functionality error.
- If I directly query the MyBB database, the titles are not in the database. If I directly query the original vB database, they are there.  So again, definitely has to be a conversion issue.

A couple other, not so important things:

- There were some small forum permissions issues that I can take care of, so I'm not worried about those.
- The attachment image thumbnails don't display. They are there since I can mouse over them and select them. Probably, when I do the real import, I won't enable them anyway.


So, any guidance as to why everything would have basically converted except the thread titles?

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Though it's not completed yet, it appears that the issue was PHP7. Some things were apparently not just deprecated but fully removed in PHP7 and MyBB 1.8 still uses them. So I backed down to 5.5, and it appears to be going well. I'm not getting any of the deprecation messages now as the threads and posts are being processed. So probably the message in the MyBB docs shouldn't say 5 is recommended, but that anything post-5 probably ain't gonna work for 1.8.

Anyhoo, I'm optimistic that that was all it was. Use of an older PHP doesn't much matter for us since MyBB would be the only thing on our server that is using it really. As long as it isn't a security liability as it is used by MyBB it's fine. I guess later, when 2.0 comes out it'll be happy with PHP7 and we can move up.

Anyhoo, for the benefit of posterity, I'll post back later after process completes, to indicate for sure whether it fixed it or not.

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The conversion did indeed go correctly once I moved down to PHP 5.5. The only thing obvious that's incorrect is the 'last post' for each thread is not the actual last post. Not a biggie really, just reporting it.

Hi, as the merge system isn't developed anymore it didn't get an update supporting PHP 7 (though it should but as said it won't get an update anymore). The lastpost issue can likely be fixed by running the recount/rebuild tools in your Admin CP and/or clearing the caches.

Is that because it is going to be replaced with something else, or because MyBB just won't support imports anymore?

BTW, in the end, it looks the one thing that didn't work out well during the merge is that links to other threads are broken. I installed in the same path as the previous (vb) installation, so the path of the links are the same, but presumably the thread ids didn't come out the same, and the threads are linked via a tid=xyz type of query parameter. I guess it doesn't attempt to reproduce the thread ids in the new database? Anyway, all of the links to other threads now fail.

Actually, even had the thread ids come out the same, one uses tid=xyz and the other uses t=xyz, which would have made them fail anyway. It would be really nice if links could be adjusted. It would require keeping a lookup table of original thread id and new thread id I guess. But it can be sorted by id, so a quick binary lookup could be done.

Looks like attachment links are broken as well. Given the time it spends converting the attachments, it's definitely not worth it if they aren't going to work after the conversion.

Is this to be expected, or did something go wrong?

So it turns out that the attachments weren't broke, what happened as that none of our custom attachment types got brought forward, so it would just fail when someone tried to download one of them.

I went to add those back, and found that there's a limit on the extension length and one of our file types is one character over so we can't add that back. I'll report that over in the main section.

I would agree, in the beginning i thought the attachment links were broken too but i guess the custom attachment bring brought forward makes much more sense than all the other arguments.