MyBB Community Forums

Upgrading my site to use MyBB from a really old and heavily modded phpBB. I'd like to setup a permanent redirect via .htaccess to direct users from old links to the new ones.

Old phpBB board is in domain.tld/forums/ and new MyBB board is in domain.tld/board/

I have tried the following but its not doing anything. Anyone have an idea? I've got a bunch of stuff to redirect so whatever help I can get would be great.

This is what I have in my root .htaccess file. The regular mybb seo .htacess is in the /board folder and it works correctly by itself.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^forums/viewtopic2\.php\?topic=([0-9]+)$ board/thread-$1.html [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

I'll set the [p] flag for a perm move once I get the basics worked out

Why redirect? Why not convert the old forum to mybb?

I still need to redirect existing links from the old forum to the new one. I built a conversion script to migrate all the data over (15k users, 980k posts, 10k PMs) to MyBB but there are still links out there to the old location/files.

Once I remove the old files, users will get a 404 error that I can trap and redirect but basic php header() function returns a temporary rule, whereas in the end I want a permanent move for a while until I am comfortable that the search engines have been through a few times. Then I will let old links fail