Can you post the temporary address to your new forum? If you'd rather, PM me the IP address and I'll take a look at it. Try converting 40 or so messages and then look at the forum home and see what you get.

Paul

IT'S A GIRL!!! WELL SORTA!!

See your PM.

Yours,

Kirk

I'M AN IDOT!!!
I'M AN IDOT!!!
I'M AN IDOT!!!

All I had to do (esp. since the test was old) was to change the "last 30 days" to "BEGINNING" and there it was!!

OH MY GOODNESS!!

YOU ARE WONDERFUL!!

OK, I'm naming my next child PAUL!!!

Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!!

OK, now PM me and tell me where you are!! I travel all over the country and teach Professional Photography!! IF you are in a city that I go to, I want to photograph your family, or take them to dinner, or do something for you!!

YOU HAVE NO IDEA how thankful I AM!!

A little girl!! So cute and sweet!!

Thanks again my friend!!

Yours,

Kirk Voclain

Heh. Not so fast. Note the date it claims all those posts were made. Something tells me you didn't have a really popular site in 1970... I'm off to examine the date function :) Be back with some updated code in a few...

do you have $useunixtime="1" set in the options?

Do you want me to go in and delete everything to retry the test???

Kirk

YES!!

$useunixtime="1"

That is how I have it.

Kirk

Just check for me and let me know if you have $useunixtime="1" in the settings at the top of the file before I go crazy trying to figure out what went wrong ;D

You *SHOULD* have $useunixtime="1" since you're using WebBBS 5.0

Ok. Yet another mistake on my part. Download the attached file, delete all of the posts you've already converted, and try again. :)

This time the dates should be correct.

Paul

Edit: The updated file can be found in the first post in this thread.

Here is and exact copy of what is in the script!! NOTICE that I have the offset to -0 could that have caused the problem???

HERE YOU GO:

// Earlier versions of WebBBS used local server time values for your messages. Enter in
// the offset from GMT to insert the correct timestamp into the database. For example, if
// the server where WebBBS files were saved was EST (GMT -5), you'd set the following value
// to "-5". You only need to change this if you've set $useunixdate = "0" (below):
$gmtoffset = "-0";

// Are you using an older version of WebBBS that does not use unix time? If so, set the
// following to "0". If you are using 5.x, leave the value below to "1":
$useunixdate = "1";

Yours,

Kirk

Nope, you had the right settings. I misspelled $useunixdate in the script where it checks the value. It was trying to process the date for older versions of WebBBS. I went back as I made the various revisions we tried and made sure that it would be backwards compatible for anyone using earlier versions of WebBBS such as the one I was using. ;)

LOOK,,,,LOOK,,,,at my new baby girl!!!

She is so cute!! Has the right dates, the correct names, EVEN the pictures!!

YOU ARE THE MAN!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you so much!!

YOU have my codes, go and check it out!! She's working!!!!

WONDERFUL!!!

Kirk Voclain

Looks great! :D Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to bed. ;)

Early appointment tomorrow morning! :D Let me know if you have any other problems.

The majority of the problems that have been experienced in the past with this script was my failure to globally define the $forumid variable. Thanks to Kirk's feedback, I was able to get down the right track to figure it out. There are multiple functions being used in the script and I neglected to realize that I wasn't doing a global $forumid; ... that and the occasional snag with versions. ;)

This should work great with both older versions and the newest versions of WebBBS.

I have uploaded version 1.15r of the script which should fix any problems with extra line breaks being added by the script.

For those of you who have already converted, running the following queries should correct this problem. Run the queries in the order specified below:

First:
Second:
Third:
Fourth:
Backup your database before attempting this. :)

What's the latest on this? Does the 116 WebBBS converter work with vB3? Or is there a newer version?

I've got a big WebBBS 5.12 system I'd like to import into vB3.

Thanks

No. This works with vBulletin 2.x. You would have to install vB2, import with this script, then upgrade the results to vB3.

Thanks!

I've got a version of this I updated to work with WebBBS 5.12 and vb3. Let me know if you are interested. Going directly to vb3 allows the threads to remain intact.

It'd probably be very helpful to others if you post it here as an attachment or create a new "hack."

Here it is. It will likely need tweaking for each individual as I tuned it to handle how I did smilies on my site. The vb3 sections could probably be used for any other system as well.

Outstanding! I've got an ancient installation of WebBBS that I'm converting to VB3. About the only thing I needed to adjust was the table names in all the SQL. I have the vb prefix in front of everything.

Some comments... follow the instructions VERY carefully in regard to the sequences. You have to convert in order, you can't bounce around. It's probably easiest to copy your webbs files from each forum out of their respective bbs(x) directories and into a single location and run the script. One forum at a time.

One extremely important point. If you have multiple webbbs forums, which I presume most people do, you will need to clear the originalid and previousid bookmark fields from the vbulletin post table after each forum conversion, (using an update query). This is not documented in the instructions. The script relies on these "bookmark" fields and if you don't clear out the previous forum's data from these fields, your threads will be hopelessly jumbled.

Also, given the above two points on multiple forum conversions, it follows that you need to turn off your webbbs forums and do the conversions all at once. It would be extremely difficult to come back and update a multiple forum conversion process as you'd have lost your original/previous references for all but the last forum you converted. It really is a one shot deal.

Again, great work. This script saved me who knows how many hours and probably a fair chunk of $$$ in consulting expense. Many thanks!

Tom,

I looked at your wbb3.php code and it seems to be exactly what I need - And I can follow every instruction except the MySQL changes.

Can anyone walk this phpMySQL newbie through the

ALTER TABLE post ADD COLUMN originalid int(5);
ALTER TABLE post ADD COLUMN previousid int(5);

steps. After that I'm fine, but what exactly do I need to do here?

Well, To think that I can convert from WebBBS to VB3.03 sounds truely fantastic.

I did run into a problem it seems.

My error message is this.

Script Version 1.3-WebBBS
WebBBS-to-vBulletin 3.0 Message Converter

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare html_entity_decode() in /hsphere/local/home/cybermac/cybermacro.com/forums_webbbs/forum1/bbs0/wbb3.php on line 130

I appreciate any help to get this working.

Thanks,

Gary

For my above post, is it a problem that the messages were created in WebBBS 5.00, not 5.12?

Gary

I'm in the same boat - I have phpMyAdmin but it looks like I could really mess things up without help to make the changes. Anyone have a step-by-step?

EDIT: Found this!

In phpMyAdmin, click "SQL". Then copy and paste this:
ALTER TABLE post ADD COLUMN previousid int(5);
there and click "Go".

EDIT: WORKED GREAT!

64,949 posts including 13,667 threads imported!

Is there any way to get these "imported existing user posts" to sync up with "user profiles" as new profiles for the poster are entered on the board?

After successful conversion of my major WebBBS archive boards, I'd like to proceed to converting my other WebBBS boards into my vb board.

One major question comes up: Since I have created an additional board on my vb site, will these current threads and posts interfere with more WebBBS archive posts converting in?

Obviously, these interim posts have been numbered with the vb thread and post counters, so I'm looking to find out if this will upset the wagon. Can I add more archival posts to the same board as I converted before, or do they need to go to a "new" board?

It it apparent that ALL posts and threads on a vb system share the same counters.

I set up another forum, got its assigned number (21) and placed it into wbb3convert and then imported an additional 735 posts including 238 threads.

I ran "Rebuild Forum Information" before and after converting. After the import, running "Rebuild Forum Information" reducess the above numbers to 547 posts including 238 threads.

I have repeated this process several times with the same results. (I'm getting good at mysqldump and mysql restore!)

It is apparent that the missing posts from board #21 have landed into forum #2. They don't belong there. Why is this happening?

You will have to clear out the values in the originalid column as the post numbers that webbbs uses overlap on seperate forums (for example, foruma.cgi might have a post #423 and so will forumb.cgi). Run a query similar to the following after importing each individual forum:

I'm not sure if changes to the script to support a direct vb3 conversion would require additional changes.

Thank you for the command!
I'm getting it! I was just in on myphpadmin looking at the data and I see that each record retains this previous/next numeric data. After the records are converted in, Vbulletin doesn't need that information and the ONLY reason that I would need it is if additional records from the SAME board were to be brought in.

I also saw that records added by Vbulletin were NULL in those fields, therefore, interim posting on Vbulletin shouldn't matter.

It is when I need to bring in an unrelated board with record numbers in a lower or different range than before, that the new fields need to be NULLed.

My board system has related forums and unrelated forums. I'm thinking of having two sets of "originalid and previousid" fields (named differently) and using two different import scripts (fields renamed) so as to manage importing these related and unrelated forums.

EDIT: It worked! The additional fields worked! All finished! I imported 18,207 threads including 81,327 posts from seven different boards! Life is good! Thank you Vbulletin and thank you Paul, TGMorris and Dustyb for the conversion script and the encouraging information!

I have two Web BBS 5.0 forums that I want converted to Vbulletin. I will pay a resonable fee for this work.

PM me if interested.

Gary

The function processquotes does not seem to be working for me. The routine is changing my WebBBS quote symbol into the tempsymbol okay, but the conversion of lines preceded by the tempsymbol into vBulletin quoted text just isn't happening. I'm getting the tempsymbol appearing in my posts.

I've not changed processquotes at all, but I'm afraid my PHP isn't good enough to check how it works. My initial thought was that I'd maybe copies the WebBBS files into the conversion directory as binary files (I can tell that processquotes needs the tempsymbol to start the line), but, after I carefully recopied the files, I was able to rule that out.

Any other suggestions?

[Later]:

I added to the function, and this solved the problem. I imagine that I'm going to have to make $last_indent global as well, though I haven't investgated this yet. I'm just glad to have got this one mysterious bug out of the way.

It's gone two in the morning and it's waaaay past my bedtime.

[Added in the morning]:

Of course $last_indent doesn't need to be global. It's only used to communicate between the processing of lines of a single message.

Is this for WebBBS by Darryl Burgdorf?

Yes.

Thanks for the reply. I though so but I looked for something like this a couple of years ago and didn't find anything so I gave up. I'll have to test this. If it works, I've got several thousand posts in a webbbs forum I had up between 1997 and 1998 which I wouldn't mind importing for 'history'.

I am still looking for someone to import 3 old web bbs forums for me into Vbulletin. I will pay $85.00 for this work.

If you can provide enough data, Jelsoft might want to add webbbs support to the official ImpEx utility. Try asking at vbulletin.com

Would be the best way to go.

I appreciate your suggestion.

Someone has created a conversion script posted here, and I have read o various success stories in using it, but I was not able to get it to work myself, so was hopeful that someone that was familar with working with it could do the import for me.

Gary

In the conversion file posted by tgmorris in Dec 2003, the following appears:

**** IMPORTANT ****
In order for this script to keep track of messages and to later serve as a reference
point for old bookmarked messages, you will need to make a change to your vBulletin
mySQL database. You will need to insert rows into the "post" table of the
vBulletin database. THIS SCRIPT WON'T WORK WITHOUT THE ADDITION OF THESE ROWS!

i.e. ALTER TABLE post ADD COLUMN originalid int(5);
ALTER TABLE post ADD COLUMN previousid int(5);

Is this really required? After reading the above commented lines, I assume this is for when users have bookmarked posts found in WebBBS and so they can find the same posts when searching in vBulletin. I wonder will the script work fine if I don't amend the 'post' tables in vBulletin...

Yes, it is required to determine where the posts will be inserted. Old bookmarks will not work without altering showthread.php and using something like mod_rewrite or a custom perl script to point to the proper vbulletin page.

Hey just wanted to say huge Thanks! I used the modified script for vB3 and it seems to have worked like a charm. It's only a small forum (a few hundred messages) but it means a lot to the site owner. Awesome :) :)