A fresh installation for an existing forum

[HSN]

Hello!

I have been running a forum for about 5 years. It contains a lot of threads and has many registered users. However, the installation and configuration is quite old and it has many hacks and modifications that are annoying me. I decided to have a completely fresh installation of the forum and just import the threads, users and their pm's to the new one.

Anyone has suggestion of the best way to do this?

[Steve Machol]

There is no good or supported way to do this. One *unsupported* way you can try is to install a new copy of vB to a new database, then use Impex to import the old data to the new one. Please read the online Impex import instructions here:

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

Also please view the 'After the Import' instructions here:

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

Note: This will change all your existing user, post, thread and forum ID numbers. So all posted links will no longer work, as well as search engine results from prior to this import.

[HSN]

Sounds good and I started to import using ImpEx. However, an issue that arises with ImpEx is that it says that it has imported x number of users for instance, but there is nothing in the target forum!

[Steve Machol]

You need to follow the 'After the Import' instructions here:

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