Thinking of Installing vB
 

Hey there. I currently run an invision board, and I am looking to move the board to my main site once I move it to a new server. I am pretty impressed so far by vBulletin and the mods here... it seems like it's less hacked up than Invision is. What I am wondering is 1) how hard is a conversion from Invision to vBulletin. Can I just backup my board over on Invision, install vBulletin to the new server, and then convert the backup to a vBulletin? What do I use to do the conversion? Does it save everything so my users won't have to re-register, lose postcounts, or anything like that?

I might have more questions but I'll start out with these.

To convert IB to vB2 (no importers for vB3 exist yet, but you can go IB -> vB2 -> vB3) you install vB2 into a new database and then run the import script to import IB into your vB, I'm pretty sure thats the way it works. Its certainly not very complicated :)

vB supply a IB 1.2 to vB 2.3.4 conversion script in the members area, I'm pretty certain it should convert all your users, posts/threads at least and probably converts some other stuff too.

Alright, well that sounds good then :) So basically all that would be lost are uploaded avatars and pictures and things of the like, I'm guessing... but that's not a real big issue... I'll go ahead and give everyone fair warning.

What vBulletin would you reccomend sitting with right now? 2 or 3? To make a long story short, I just want to be able to get the store and the arcade going, and that ought to give enough for my members to play with for a while :)

It might convert everything, I've never used the IB importer so I can't really say, if you ask over at vB.com I'm sure the support staff will know :)

If you want both the arcade and store you'll be forced to use vB2 as only the Arcade is avaible here for vB3 at the moment. Ignoring that I'd recommend vB3, its alot better all round IMO. However you have to start with vB2 to do the import.