Converting from phpBB Question
 

Hi,

I am interested in buying a vBulletin license, but I currently use phpBB. I will need to be able to convert from phpBB-->vBulletin in order to use vBulletin though.

Here is the problem; I am using phpBB 2.0.19. But I have also installed the "Categories Hierarchy 2.1.4" hack. This is an extensive mod which allows subforums and a ton of other things on my forum.

So will the impex thing I've heard about work with the Categories Hierarchy hack on phpBB? Because the mod really moved a lot of code and SQL tables around.

Thank you

I am not familiar with ImpEx myself through experience, but I know of people who have made the transition across fairly well even with such a modification installed.

This thread on .com may be interesting for you to read, particularly the last post: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1183492


Hope to see you making the move across to vBulletin :)

Ok thank you; one more quick question. One of my friends did basically the same thing I did (Only with regular phpBB) and he had a really hard time with the conversion. He used phpBB2, and impex; and he said the importing worked fine until he got to posts, when all it did was do like 2 rounds of the posts, and then just hanged and didn't do anything. And he only had like 20,000 posts (and impex would hang after about 8,000 of them)

I have 40,000+! Am I going to experience similar problems?

I'd suggest reading this thread. Also, you shouldn't have that problem. If you do, simply report the bug, and post a suppor topic on the 3.6 ImpEx system forum on vb.com.

I can tell you from experience that Impex works pretty darn well importing phpBB with the category hierarchy mod (subforums). I worked with the Impex developer to get it working better.

It's not perfect, but for my forum, it imported about 90% of the subforums perfectly. The other 10%, I just needed to move to the appropriate location. Posts/Threads/Attachments/Users, etc. imported without a problem.

Another problem I had that caused Impex to hang was the amount of memory allocated to the script (PHP). I had to configure this from the default of 8MB to 32MB I think. Then Impex stopped hanging.

Impex asks you how many posts you want to transfer per cycle. One thing you can try is to lessen the default cycle number to a lower number. For example, I think the default is 2000 posts per cycle. Reduce this to say, 500. It will take longer for the script to run, but it may keep the script from hanging.