MyBB Community Forums

Spent a long time getting the merge system to run (seems it hates PHP8, so we had to spin up a VM with PHP7 and start all over).

Got that working, but the Moderators Module is broken for IPBv3 (wrong column name references, then it gets stuck in an endless loop). The Users Module is also pulling the wrong field_# for some pointless things like "ICQ" (who uses that anymore lol).

Spent the day doing the merge, because its a 1million post IPBv3 forum we are trying to migrate away from... thats fine, we expected that part to take awhile. Except the Avatars Module decided to use "20" (instead of 1000 we entered) for avatars to convert ... of 50,000 users... that was painful with no way to adjust it after the fact.

The post conversion result was quite a mess though.

It's decided almost all posts and signatures that have basic BBcode in them (things like b, url, quote), are to be rendered face value, and not formatted. Only by clicking edit on each one by hand, and then clicking the 'save' button does it update. Signatures too. Yikes.


Along with that, it has also decided to randomly make newlines doubled in most things. Not all, just most. Enough to make everything spread out horribly.

Couldn't find any "Rebuild BBcode" or similar cleanup operations. Oh well.

Ended up writing (hacking in) a message and signature conversion to fix all the BBCode shenanigans (and excessive newlines).

Turns out IPB used a lot of quotes (") in the bbcodes, and for some reason MyBB simply doesn't understand those at face value. Yet oddly by editing a post and saving, it clears the quotes inside bbcodes and it then works. Go figure. So I wrote some expression replacements which cleaned out quotes for offending bbcodes.

Post quoting bbcodes were the worst as it seems over the years IPB changed how it formatted those. Sometimes with a timestamp, sometimes with a date string, sometimes with a post id as a separate attribute, sometimes as the main. Then shuffling about the username too. So my conversion had to cover every oddball format in the database lol.

Thanks for your feedback.

If you wish, you could contribute to the Merge System's development at https://github.com/mybb/merge-system and perhaps also provide a sample database of IPB3 through any contact methods listed at https://mybb.com/contact/ . Many thanks!