[Forum] Help needed in forum move

[Dippetas]

Dear users
I have a problem which i need to solve but can't figure it how. i had a forum about ps3 and i was using VBulletin 3.83 and i created lots of threads and had about 200 users, my issue now is that i changed server, i changed domain and installed VBulletin 4.02 and a few mods as well. The thing is that i want to import all my users and all my threads, posts, sigs, in my new forum, but i can't imagine a way of doing that. any help would be much appreciated

[ENF]

Did you still have access to the old server and data?

You'll need at the very least a backup copy of your original database and forum files to get that data setup so you can have it in vb 4.0.2

Best practice would be to move your 3.8.3 forum to your new server and just run an upgrade over 3.8.3 to bring up to 4.0.2 -- You're not going to be able to merge your new 4.0.2 install with your old data, because the database structure is different.

[Dippetas]

Did you still have access to the old server and data?

unfortunately no, but i intend to make a fresh copy of vbulletin 3.8.3 on to my new server, import my backup, and then upgrade. But in my new forum i have intsalled skins mods hacks and i don't want to lose them. do you know if a make a backup and imported again if i'm gonna have my mods and the users threads e.t.c from the previous backup???
By the way thanks for your quick reply

Thanks in advance Dimitrios

[Sador]

Oh my.

You pretty much have to do the following:

- Setup a vB3 board.
- Import your vB3 backup in there.
- Disable all addons / hacks
- Upgrade to vB4 - check the install guide if you're unsure what to do.
- Upgrade existing mods to the vB4 version if released, install new mods, and so on. Your vB3 mods will most likely nót be compatible with vB4.

As a small extra thing.. don't bother to setup a vB4 board and import the data there.. way easier to just setup the vB3 board wherever you want it to get, and upgrade it from there.

Edit; if your forum acts weird afterwards, it may be that you didn't update the forumpath in your AdminCP or there is a cookiepath problem. You might wanna check those settings before upgrading to save yourself some trouble.

[Dippetas]

Oh my.

You pretty much have to do the following:

- Setup a vB3 board.
- Import your vB3 backup in there.
- Disable all addons / hacks
- Upgrade to vB4 - check the install guide if you're unsure what to do.
- Upgrade existing mods to the vB4 version if released, install new mods, and so on. Your vB3 mods will most likely nót be compatible with vB4.

As a small extra thing.. don't bother to setup a vB4 board and import the data there.. way easier to just setup the vB3 board wherever you want it to get, and upgrade it from there.

Edit; if your forum acts weird afterwards, it may be that you didn't update the forumpath in your AdminCP or there is a cookiepath problem. You might wanna check those settings before upgrading to save yourself some trouble.

i am afraid that i acted really fast and didn't see your post. i made a clean install with my old vb 3.8.3 and imported successfully my database. But when i did this, i didn't see your post and now i updated and i have all sorts of problems, which the most important of them is that i can't login in my admin control panel in order to change my skin so i can view it normally and not in linear mode without images and customization. is there a way to fix this? or am i gonna be making another clean install, import backup, save cookies e.tc.?
thanks again
Dimitrios

[Sador]

i am afraid that i acted really fast and didn't see your post. i made a clean install with my old vb 3.8.3 and imported successfully my database. But when i did this, i didn't see your post and now i updated and i have all sorts of problems, which the most important of them is that i can't login in my admin control panel in order to change my skin so i can view it normally and not in linear mode without images and customization. is there a way to fix this? or am i gonna be making another clean install, import backup, save cookies e.tc.?
thanks again
Dimitrios

That pretty much totally depends on your problem. First thing you should do if you changed the forumpath (for example, if your forum was located at http://www.mysite.com/forum and now has moved to http://www.mysite.com/board) is to go to your database (in phpmyadmin or something) and search for whatever the path originally was. (mysite.com/forum in this example). Now you'll get some results, some of which are just not important, and some of which you'll need to update to your current path.

If you have a cookie problem, I think you can change that in the database as well (change it to a slash , unless you have multiple boards running. ). If you can't find it in the database, I think you can do it from the config.php file as well...

Good luck.

[Dippetas]

My problem solved, I really want to thank all of you for you precious time that you devoted to me in order to solve my problems. I am afraid with out your guidance i would have never made it through.

at first i couldn't login to my admincp because of cookies, so i couldn't do anything, i searched the db to find the cookie paths, but i came across walls. Then i found in my vbulletin folder, a folder named do_not_upload and it had inside a php file that was named tools.php. I uploaded the file inside install, and boom there it was, through that file i could reset my admincp user, i could reset my cookies. After i did this it run pretty smoothly.
Thanks again to all of you for your guidance

with friendly regards
Dimitrios

[Sador]

Ah yes, I forgot about the tools.php part... well, I'm glad it's fixed.