Your forum migration experience?

[letsjoy]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?
Web Wiz ( ASP )

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)
90 MB uncompressed

How many registered members?
1500

How many threads?
4100

How many posts?
100000

How many attachments? (total and file size)
losted 100 mb+

And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?
doing all process take all night



I hate one thaing that is password reset of all member I lost alot of members due this...If I knew about it I,ll never come here...but overall experince was ok

[madkeen]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?
YaBB 2.q

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)
310 MB uncompressed

How many registered members?
17000

How many threads?
52000

How many posts?
476000

How many attachments? (total and file size)
28000 - 1549338 KB And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?
Couple of hours


VB did not and can not import attachments from YaBB, even though teh Impex docs say it will import your attachments. VB offers no support on this issue other tha to say that they had checked and Impex does not import attachments from YaBB.

Also resets all passwords and creates a massive amount of work as alot of members do not keep their E-mail address updated so they can not get a new password sent to the. That then creates a lot of work for you to change their E-mail address.

[akulion]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?
Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)
49 MB uncompressed

How many registered members?
1332

How many threads?
Threads: 4,548

How many posts?
Posts: 29,271

How many attachments? (total and file size)
none, attachments were disabled in my last forum by me

And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?
roughly about 1 hour with small issues


Some issues:
1. No avatars got imported at all
2. Banned users group got merged with normal / registered users group

[Kirkus]

I just ran a test import from YaBB 2.1 with 82,000+ posts to vBulletin 3.6.4 and I'm ecstatic! This is the first import of my YaBB 2.1 forum to a database-driven forum that actually did something besides create errors.

When it comes time to do the "real" import I'll give my members several weeks notice to update their email addresses and I'll explain to them that they'll have to reset their passwords, fix their birthdates and reattach any attachments once the move is complete. I'll give myself a weekend to rename and reorder the boards and reset usergroups and permissions.

In my opinion it's a small price to pay to keep 3+ years of discussions intact.

Thank you, Jerry!

[sph33r]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?
PHPBB

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)
I'm not sure.. I deal with flat files for my backups so... gzipped it's about 200mb. Unzipped the flat file is showing 1,411,082,863. VB's database dumps are way smaller. PHPBB had those huge search tables.

How many registered members?
5800+

How many threads?
65000+

How many posts?
1,088,000+

How many attachments? (total and file size)
I don't remember the total attachments.. but it's about 2.5gb

And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?
7 hours to import posts. That was the longest thing. I know it went a lot faster than I expected!

[Rootsy]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?

PHPBB2 2.0.22 to be exact

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)

1.53 Mb Compressed, database

How many registered members?

80

How many threads?

450

How many posts?

1050

How many attachments? (total and file size)

None

And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?

a few hours.... but...

I'm just a dumb engineer who can't type, read or spell and the syntax in mysql and such tripped me up a few times... otherwise it went pretty smoothly with a bit of searching here. But why didn't my smilies install correctly

[machethier]

vBulletin 3.6.5 - impex 1.80

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?
Invision Board( 2.2.2)

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)
1400 MB uncompressed

How many registered members?
14500

How many threads?
14100

How many posts?
50000

How many attachments? (total and file size)
500 mb

And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?
3 hours

[sjcallas]

http://www.wanderhomies.com (a mirror of the old site is still up, and the link is shown on this site)

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to? IPB 2.1.7
How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile) The raw SQL file was about 170MB
How many registered members? 624
How many threads? 9,238
How many posts? 151,137
How many attachments? (total and file size) 0, 0
And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert? 1 hour

I'd say that everything went great. Things that didn't transfer, or got corrupted were at a minimal. PMs did not transfer though. The PM titles transferred, but the content itself became [array] for all of them. The biggest info lost was in the polls, with about 35% of the polls not transferring (about 100). All users transferred fine, only one post didn't make it, and under 10 threads. Avatars and pictures didn't transfer either, but that wasn't an issue since I have a mirror site up of the old IPB version.

the BIGGEST issue, that I am still dealing with, is passwords. A large majority of users are having login issues. Apparently, their passwords did not transfer correctly, so they're dealing with either corrupted passwords or wrong passwords all together. Aside from that, everything is going great!

[Gabrielt]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?

IPB 2.2.2

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)

database dump with mysqldump: 2.2 GB uncompressed, 660 MB compressed with tgz

How many registered members?

151,823

How many threads?

428,162

How many posts?

2,185,166

How many attachments? (total and file size)

52,049

Plus: 145,205 private messages

And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?

2 weeks. The problem was like this. I was trying to convert using our servers at our hosting company, however the process took too long. The thread conversion is the big issue, as the performance slows exponentially as the number of converted threads increase. Up to 65,000 threads is a piece of cake, but after that the conversion rate drops dramatically. For example, for the first half hour ImpEx converted like 2,000 threads/minute, but then this rate was dropping and at the end it was somewhere near 160 threads/minute. We got several timeouts and after 3 days running this conversion with no success we decided to make a dump of the database and then install it on a local server.

These 2 week includes the time it took for dumping the database and downloading it, creating a Debian server, installing and configuring Apache, PHP and MySQL, doing the conversion, dumping the new database, sending it back to our main server, inserting it, converting attachments and final adjustments.

After doing this, the thread conversion took 22 hours and post conversion took another 25 hours. Not bad for converting 2.2 million messages.

So, my tip for people converting large forums is doing like we did: make a mysql dump, install it on a local server and run the conversion process locally. The only step required to be ran at the final server is the attachment conversion. In our case, as attachments compressed gave 6.5 GB, we though it was better to run this conversion at the final server (this step is one before the last one, which is smilie conversion, which ran in a few seconds).

Kept our forum down for 2 weeks was the worst part of it. If we knew this information before, we could have done the entire process in less than 1 week.

Cheers,
Gabriel.

[Jerry]

So, my tip for people converting large forums is doing like we did: make a mysql dump, install it on a local server and run the conversion process locally. .

This is a good way of doing it as the ImpEx session is stored in the datastore in the database so you can stop an import between modules indefinably and move the session with the database between servers.

[WielerArchieven]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?
IPB 1.2

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)
8 MB compressed/30 MB uncompressed

How many registered members?
695

How many threads?
7285

How many posts?
32515 (only lost two during import)

How many attachments? (total and file size)
+/- 2800 - 151 MB (mostly JPG images, some Word and Excel documents too)

And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?
+/- one week

Importing from IPB 1.2 wouldn't work at first, but with the tremendous help of Marco would went through the loops to get a working version i got a test import in 38 minutes.

The shear beauty of it is that the passwords came over intact. Attachments also got imported.


After some more test runs, i moved my domain to another host and there the import took little over 7 minutes ... which doesn't plead for my old hosting provider


All in all i'm a very happy camper


Great job Jerry and Marco

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Good to hear you made your final import successfully Stef.

[Fireproof]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to? WebWizForums / SOOP
How many registered members? ~700
How many threads? ~2500
How many posts? ~50,000+
How many attachments? (total and file size) N/A
And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert? Not counting the testing, it took about 2 hours or so. The initial import with ImpEx was rather quick (<30min) but then had to move usergroups around, fix permissions, etc.

So far the users seem really happy. You can check it out here: ClutchFitness.com

There were some downsides coming from WWF. I wasn't able to port over the avatars or smilies or passwords. But those negatives are far outweighed by all the positives of vBulletin.

[Exciter]

From what forum software did you convert to vBulletin to?
UBBthreads 6.4

How big is the database in file size? (compressed/uncompressed, database or flatfile)
uncompressed 120 MB

How many registered members?
1500

How many threads?
4000

How many posts?
45000

How many attachments? (total and file size)
1000 50MB

And do you remember how long it took you to do the actual convert?
one night (did convert more times with different settings to get good result)

Known problems:
quote's not transported right- the BB code does not match and were not converted

poll's i did have to delete - the poll question did not match the poll result (imagine, the question is "are you smoking?" and posible answers are : 1.like beer 2. like cola 3. like water.) The poll choices came from a different thread.

no avatars were imported.

the member's birthdays have only day and year, they are missing month.

[antiekeradio]

Known problems:
quote's not transported right- the BB code does not match and were not converted

that's what you need the cleaner.php script for