Merge two VB forums

[osayidan]

First the simple question: is there a way to merge 2 vbulletin forums who already have established databases? Where one would "receive" the important things such as user accounts, threads, posts and any other data required by those 3 things. The receiver would otherwise remain intact, forum structure, layout, plugins/mods/hacks and so forth, while the other would then be discarded after having given the data.

And now onto the gory details.

One of the forums is currently running on SMF. I'm quite sure the first step would involve converting the SMF into VB with impex on a clean temporary forum.

It's what comes after that which I'm not sure of and would need assistance with.
The main problem I can imagine is that the IDs for each object in the relevant tables I need to merge would conflict with each other.

My solution to this would be to script something in PHP to read the entries of these tables from the "donor" forum and append them into the corresponding tables of the "receiver" forum, making use of the auto increment for the ID fields.

The next issue would be what forum sections threads would end up in. I think this can be solved by another php script which would change forum IDs for each thread of the donor forum to the forum IDs of the receiver forum that I want them to go in. For example if "Category 5" on the donor is forum ID 87, and I want them to go in "Category 17" on the reciever which is ID 29, would have php cycle through every thread and change 87's into 29's.

If I'm on the right track for those two things then all I'm worried about after that point is conflicting user names. Wouldn't be too sure how to handle those other than renaming them, and if they turn out to be the same physical person, manually merge them upon request, and at some future date discard unclaimed duplicates.

So am I on the right track with this? Any input from someone who knows the back end of VB fairly well would be much appreciated.

[osayidan]

No comments on this?

I've been studying the DB structure and it seems entirely possible, there's just a lot of things to take into consideration. So I'll be doing some tests with this soon.

Any feedback would still be appreciated though.

--------------- Added [DATE]1271889357[/DATE] at [TIME]1271889357[/TIME] ---------------

Update:

I've been told by a couple of non-official VB sources that impex -can- merge VB forums together.

However from many other non-official sources, everyone says that all impex will do is convert the database into a clean VB, destroying any data that was already there. The documentation I can find doesn't mention any merging however.

What's the real answer on impex and merging then?

Thanks.