import users from phpbb3 to vb5

[plongeur.com]

Hi, I am considering "merging" an old phpbb3 forum into a vbulletin5 one.
I actually only care about users profile and not so much about posts and topics.

The idea would be to match users based on the email and create the ones that are not already there.

Do you think this is doable ? has anyone ever tried/achieved this ?
VB should really revive impex...

[Dave]

I'm sure several people have done this, usually by importing the phpbb3 data into a vBulletin 3/4 forum through impex, and then by upgrading to vBulletin 5.

[plongeur.com]

the funny part is that i already have a lot of users and content in my VB5 forum.

I thought doing the VB4 impex and upgrade VB5 but i still would have to merge the users of the two VB5 instances in the end... i am not sure this is easily doable.

[Dave]

Ah yes... having existing data in the target database will definitely make this a bit harder.

In that case you can do something like:
1. Copy the existing tables to another table or database.
2. Empty the tables that you copied over in the previous step, and make sure to check the seed (primary key) and set it to the last known ID you have.
3. Do the migration from phpbb.
4. Move back the users from step 1, ignoring any duplicates.

[noypiscripter]

I didn't fully read. Pleas ignore this post.

[plongeur.com]

Originally Posted by Dave

Ah yes... having existing data in the target database will definitely make this a bit harder.

In that case you can do something like:
1. Copy the existing tables to another table or database.
2. Empty the tables that you copied over in the previous step, and make sure to check the seed (primary key) and set it to the last known ID you have.
3. Do the migration from phpbb.
4. Move back the users from step 1, ignoring any duplicates.

The hard part about that would me making sure that you don't end up with an incoherent DB that might come back to bite you several months after...

so you have to check that you correctly identified all users informations in the DB and you took only these ones...