phpBB2 Importer

Heya everyone. This is a beta release of my importer that converts phpBB2 (RC4 or greater) into vBulletin. It should convert into vBulletin 2.2.0 or greater.

To install the script:[list=1][*]Download bbimport_phpbb2.php from this post (You can only download it if you have entered your username in the vBulletin Members Area, DO NOT PRIVATE MESSAGE ME ASKING ME TO SEND IT TO YOU!!)[*]Open your FTP program of choice, and upload it to the /importers directory in your vBulletin folder (You may need to create this folder if you have never run an importer before)[*]Log into your vBulletin Control Panel[*]On the left navigation pane, find the 'Import & Maintenance' section, and click on 'BB Import Systems'[*]In the page that loads, select 'phpBB2 RC4+', and click 'Begin Import'[*]Follow the instructions from there[/list=1]
Post your results here! Let me know anything that goes wrong, or your success story

Current Version: 0.9.5.2

[mudanoman]

Everything went smoothly until importing the topics. I dont really care about the votes...any help would be appreciated. -mm

mySQL Database Error!

Script That Crashed: phpBB2 Importer
Script Returned: Bad SQL Syntax: SELECT * FROM phpbb_vote_results WHERE vote_id =
mySQL Said: You have an error in your SQL syntax near '' at line 1 (Error Number 1064)

[tomspics]

Can't seem to get it to show up in CP either. Does this work with the new 3.0 beta vb?

[mccollin]

Hi folks... I've got a few questions as I prepare for the big merge of two forums. I built a phpBB system and just purchased a site that is vB and I want to merge the two. But, my current site has a lot of custom pages that are content fed from the forum database... and I want to maintain my external links, google placement, etc.

Here are my questions...

1. Am I correct that this should work going from phpBB 2.0.3 to vB 2.3.0?

2. What does this importer do or not do, compared to the Jelsoft one?

3. I am going to have users that need to be merged... I believe you do that in the import, correct?

4. Here's the biggy. I want to create a couple of tables to use with a redirect script. One with phpBB topicid and vb threadid.. the other one with phpBB postid and vb postid. I will then replace the phpBB viewtopic.php with a simple redirect that pulls the topicid from the url, and redirects to the appropriate vb thread. I have many custom pages that will need this to. How hard would this be to do? Could you direct me to the part of the import code where I would need to make the mod... or better yet, would you be willing to add it? I've got to believe that other people could use this. I will donate my redirect scripts back, if you can add it to the import... so that its official. I'm a bit leary of messing with the import script.

Thanks.

[mccollin]

OK, I ran the test and things look like they went well. The users merged fine. The only real problem I saw was that the user groups didn't get created, but I can redo that... no biggy.

So, my primary question is still the last one. Can I get some help grabbing the old topic and post numbers and putting them in a table with the new thread and post numbers (2 tables).

[mccollin]

As an alternative, would this work?

I have concluded that there are roughly 100 missing topics in my phpBB database. I'm assuming that the import script moves them over sequentially, so if I create dummy topics, and then change their topic ids to the missing numbers, I should end up with a clean index that I can add to the old topic number, to get to the new thread number? Would this work?

Is there any danger of creating these dummy records? Should I create them as real topics and then change their id numbers, or should I just insert rows in the topic table? I'm guessing that I should create the topics with a dummy id, then I can purge the user's messages for that ID after very easily. Is there any risk of changing the topic ids?

This won't work for the posts because there are just too many of them, but I think that getting topics straight will solve most of my problems for now.

Thanks.

[Nebula]

[fx]assassin: That's an error in vBulletin, though it's probably caused by my thing. But I don't know why that's happening. I'd go ask JelSoft.

No, this does not work with vBulletin 3.0 (any version). It is ONLY for vBulletin 2.2.x.

Read the hack info page, I believe it tells you what mine does and doesn't do. About Merging, mine supports merging, but ONLY if the usernames are the same. JelSoft allows you to merge users with different names.

mccollin: Yes, dummy topics should be fine. I wouldn't make them blank rows though, since they'll have to have the correct topic name and such. Make sure you know what you're doing. Backup the database.

[mccollin]

OK, I went ahead and let it rip... a few problems to report...

Announcements - these are messed up. I would recommend that anyone planning to use this unset the announcement bit on those topics. I had two very long threads that were annoucements, and the import converted the original topic post to a vBulletin annoucement, and dropped the rest of the thread! Ahhh! I'm attempting to rebuild the two threads by copying and pasting them all in my id, then going into the database and changed the userid. Hopefully this will work.

Moved Threads - all of the moved threads that had a pointer in the original location left empty topics in the original location with a date of 1969. It was easy to prune them out when I figured out what had happened.

Private Messages - gone... don't know why, but none of them came over.

I tried the dummy topics to sync things up, but that didn't work. For some reason a few of the topics didn't make it and that hosed up my counts. Two of them were the annoucements... don't know what the others were.

There is no turning back for me.. the site gets too much traffic to turn it off and fool with the database. I'm trying to clean things up now after the fact. I guess I should have done more testing beforehand, but I didn't have much time.

[Nebula]

dang. It works really well for some. I guess all I have to say is stick with phpBB until vBulletin3 goes gold/final, and they release an official importer.

[mccollin]

I did do a redirect script which is working fine.

A couple of other things I've noticed.

Anyplace that I had a heading in something with bold and size=, it erased the heading, the bold, and the size, and left a single bold tag by itself.

And, some of the url tags got hosed up as well. It seems that anyplace the bb codes got complicated, I had problems.

Unfortunately, I didn't test this enough before pulling the trigger.

I am finding other odd data problems here and there, but as I said... no turning back at this point. I'll have to clean things up as I find the problems.

And, I'm not using vB V3, I'm totally on vB V2.3. Just do a lot of testing on this before you use it to make sure it will bring things over... and get rid of the announcement flag on any topics, because it totally killed those threads on me.

[Nebula]

well, I do not reccomend doing this in a production environment (always do a test first ). Sorry it didn't work out completely for you though.