Converting SMF to Vbulletin?

[sinfull]

I have a SMF board of about 30k users.
I do not want to change to vbulletin unless I can somehow convert all my current stuff to vbulletin

So the question is: How would I change SMF to Vbulletin?

[SEOvB]

download impex from vbulletin.com members area (available after you purchase vbulletin)

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/impex

[sinfull]

Thanks guys

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Did you read the manual that was linked to in post #2?

PS Moving out of Pre-Sales.

[sinfull]

Didn't see that

[SEOvB]

I suggest creating a couple test imports first. Backup your SMF DB a few times, then create your vBulletin DB, and practice importing data.

It's really simple, and you can't really screw it up if you know how to read.

If you need help after you read the manual just ask

[Marco van Herwaarden]

There is not really a need to create extra backups of the source board, nothing is written to the source board.

[MrEyes]

A few months ago I did the same migration, the following is my experience and advice

1) The most important thing to do is to run a few test conversions before anything, I ran about 6 or 7 tests until I had got my head around everything and was prepared to do "live" migration.

2) Unless impex has changed in the last few months, all your current users will have to reset their password. Once vBulletin is live, you can use the inbuilt email system to send all users an "activation" email which includes a link that they have to visit. This is needed as the password hashing mechanisms in SMF and VB are not compatible.

3) When I migrated I decided to store my attachments/avatars etc in the vBulletin DB. For reasons I could never explain a small percentage of attachments failed migration. I have no more information on this as the percentage was so small I never bothered looking into it any further. Since then I have moved these to the filesystem (all done via ACP)

4) As mentioned above impex does not change anything in your SMF install, however I would still strongly suggest making a backup.

5) Once you are done, make sure you leave your SMF install disabled. I forget this and for a small amount of time users could post on both, entirely my fault but with everything else I forgot

6) Working remotely can sometimes be slow, when I did my final live conversion I actually did it on my local machine (which mirrored my hosts config) and then uploaded the files and DB to the live site. From there all that was needed was some minor tweaks to the configuration (i.e. server address in ACP)

7) Another problem I could never explain is that alot of users ended up with their date of birth being 01/01/1901. In vB this is an invalid DOB so once you are on VB and attempt to update a users profile you get a warning and cannot save until the DOB is fixed (in these cases I simply remove the DOB from the profile)

8) Even though members got tonnes more functionality they still +++++ed and moaned about the fact that the SMF Total Time Online text in the header wasn't available. It had sort of become a badge of honour

9) Depending on your SMF config some animated avatars will cease to be animated. This is because vB will resize them down to whatever you setup and the resize doesn't preserve animations

10) Nobody liked the new style postbit, so I changed to legacy - this is definately a case of "horses for courses" and "we fear change"

11) On my conversion all users were defaulted to the simple editor with no smilies, so there were loads of "where have the smilies gone" threads

12) Before making your VB site live it is worth going through every single configuration option and checking each one to make sure it fits what you want.

13) After migration I found that some forums were set to order alphabetically rather than by last post date. So it is also worth checking each forums configuration as well.

14) If any of your Forum Name contain the "&" character after conversion they will display as "This & That", but in forum setup the name will be "This & That", just save it again and this will be fixed. IIRC this also applied to forum descriptions.

When I converted I have around 15k users, 30k threads and 400k posts, from beginning to end it took at most 20 minutes. I then spent a week tweaking settings

[Marco van Herwaarden]

1 comment to 11)

When user are added as much info as possible will be transfered from SMF. vBulletin settings like the editor mode are not imported, but are based on the default as set in AdminCP -> vBulletin Options -> User Registration Options. So make sure to set this how you want before importing.

[sinfull]

Wow Mr Eyes, I thank you.
I can now expect the unexpected so to speak

Cheers mate