Question before merging

[Starlight]

Hi there!
I have been wanting to merge my forum from smf to mybb for a while. The thing is that I've already converted it before from phpbb and when I did, there was some trouble with the characters using the language in utf-8, so I used it on ISO-8859-1...

I know something is not right because my forum database is in utf and the forum boards etc are in iso and it doesn't work in another way, 

my question is if I do the merge would this problem go away or stay?

If I do a testing would I still be able to stay with my smf forum in case something goes wrong?

Thanks for the help in advance. 

[.m.]

if you do a test merge and if it doesn't come out as expected then you can continue using your earlier smf forum.

put your smf forum offline, temporarily disable the plugins and then take database backup for testing conversion.

however it is preferred to do test conversion on localhost web server in your computer (eg. by using XAMPP server)

see also MyBB Merge documentation & few search results

[Jones H]

The main question is what your database tables are using. Use a tool like phpmyadmin to look what it shows (usually either latin1 or utf8). As .m. said you should then use a local backup of the database (make sure that the encoding doesn't change!) to run the merge system. On the database configuration page select the correct encoding (note that latin1 is shown as cp1252 West European) and try running the merge. If it shows weird characters reinstall the mybb forum and rerun the merge system but turn the automatic utf8 conversion off.

[Starlight]

Thank you so much to both for helping me! I will do what you said, and test this locally before doing it on the server. Hope it works.

[Starlight]

Hiiii!!

I just wanted to say that I FINALLY did the merge and it went smoothly!! I didn't do it on a local server because it wasn't working, but did it on another host and it worked perfectly! I am really amazed because I thought it wouldn't especially because on that step that asks us if we want to convert our forum into utf-8 - I did that once on smf and it showed really weird caracters. That did not happen with mybb. Should I be worried? Everything looks good except for the spoilers tag and the video tag that I need to find mods for.

Another thing, not sure if it's a problem related to merging the forum. I tried to change the width of the forum - the same size as this one - and it won't change. It's currently very large... When I do change the width it moves the entire forum to the left. Should I open another topic or is this related to the merge?


Thanks so much for making such a powerful merge feature!!! I am going to be able to finally have a forum with mybb!!

[.m.]

earlier BB codes do not work directly with MyBB. post sample converted codes & wait for someone to check

forum width related issue should be posted as a separate topic

[Starlight]

Thanks!!! 

The only things that didn't convert well were these:

the spoiler tag

[spoiler] text [/spoiler]

and the videos where we would just paste the video url (for youtube only) and it would show up the player.

Now it's showing like this:



Is there a way around this? There are pages and pages of videos... 

and the option of a quote inside a quote didn't convert well either.

it looks like this

[quote='username link' pid='1386' dateline='1451513383']
[quote] ---- this should be the other quoted user
Vegan... 
[/quote]

and then the tag didn't close it shows with a lone

at the end...
The youtube issue isn't very important but the spoiler and quote are, is there a way to fix this?
Thanks!

[Ben]

For youtube videos see this plugin: http://community.mybb.com/thread-55969.html
For the spoiler see this plugin: http://community.mybb.com/mods.php?action=view&pid=143

[Starlight]

For youtube videos see this plugin: http://community.mybb.com/thread-55969.html
For the spoiler see this plugin: http://community.mybb.com/mods.php?action=view&pid=143

Thank you so much!!! I ended up finding the spoiler one by myself but I didn't even know the other existed! It's awesome. Thank you so much for the help, to all of the people who helped me here I really appreciate it!

Also, thanks again for creating the merge because it's really spectacular!! The only thing I found that didn't work well was the quotes. A quote inside a quote, inside a quote, inside a quote. That didn't convert well. A lone quote yes, but two or more didn't work that well, but it's not too bad!! I will edit the most recent messages and the rest I will leave them be.

Thanks so much and happy 2016 everyone!

[Starlight]

Hi,

I know I marked this as solved but I just realized something!

The three top posters of my forum lost a LOT of their posts. Or, I think the only problem is with their post count, because their messages seem to all be there. The general post count of the whole forums is correct, only these are wrong.

One should have 26k posts while he has 23k posts, another 25k and has 13k instead and the other has 14k instead of 25k as well.

I can't look up all threads and see if something is missing. We have +260k messages. But that number is fine, only the profile's post count are showing different numbers from the old forum.

Did I miss something? I followed all instructions of the merge...