Test converting a large vB forum

[John Stone]

Hi,

I have a large (30,000 members / almost 1,000,000 posts) vB 3.8 forum that I'm considering moving over to the MyBB platform. All of the attachments are stored in the database.

I'd like to do a full merge of my existing forum data to a test MyBB forum that I have just installed on my servers. I have a lot of customizations and mods on my vB installation, and I need to make sure everything is working 100% before I decide to make the change.

Two questions:

- Any potential issues I need to be aware of not covered in the documentation, particularity for a forum of this size and age (almost 12 years of data)?

- Can I do a test merge while leaving the existing vB forum live? Of course I'll shut down the forum during the actual conversion process, but I'd like to let the existing forum run while I do my testing (this could take days to weeks). In other words, does the conversion process in any way alter the source data?

Thanks for any help!

[Jones H]

The merge system only selects data in the old database and doesn't modify anything related to it.

I'd suggest using the (almost) stable version from github (downloadable here). There are a few known issues (eg old links won't work, avatars aren't merged), but nothing really big (threads, posts, private messages and users should convert without problems).

The size if your database shouldn't matter (except it could take a bit longer), however if you started 12 years ago there may be some workarounds in vb where old data isn't automatically updated which I may have missed. Feel free to either send me a database dump or errors you notice and I'll try to fix them.

[John Stone]

Thanks very much!

[hatter]

Hi Jones H,

I am helping John Stone convert his vB 3.8 forum to MyBB. We are running into a few issues that I am hoping you can help with...

1. Special characters are not converting properly

Examples:
- smart quotes ( ‘ ’ and “ ” ) are being converted to "â" or "Â"
- "™" characters are converting to "¢"
- "…" are converting to "¦".

The old vB database is latin1. We are converting to utf8. Have you seen this before?

2. Private Messages are not converting properly

- subject is missing
- messages that appear in the trash folder on the old forum do not appear in the trash folder on new forum
- the "sent to" is set to "N/A" in the sent folder

3. Is there a way to prevent an internal link from opening a new window?

Thanks!

[Jones H]

1: Yes, I've seen it before but in most cases it's caused by selecting the wrong encoding when exporting the database. Usually I've seen the same behaviour when I tried to reimport the database to the original forum software. Make sure you select the correct encoding in the database configuration step (latin1 is "cp1252 West European") and try setting the "convert utf8 automatically" switch to "no".

2: Are you using the 1.8.5 version? I've fixed a lot of issues with PMs there and am not aware of any further issues.

3: AFAIK only with core edits or a special plugin. IIRC there was a tutorial or a plugin at some time but I'm not sure whether that works with 1.8.