Importing from ikonboard 3

[John]

Hi!

We're trying to guage how much support there would be for an importer from ikonboard version 3. If you are interested, or know someone who is interested, please post here to let us know!

Thanks,

John

[Simms]

I have spent the 5 or so days since I purchased vB scouring EVERY single BBS's site looking in desperation for *some* way....ANY way....to get my iB3 data into vB, regardless of how many forums I had to convert through in the process. I have spent literally hours of my time fruitlessly trying to figure out if I could pull it off.

If such a script were made available, I would fall immediately in love and ask it to bear my children (assuming my current wife wouldn't mind). I would probably be able to sleep again at night. I dare say I would even fall to my knees in gratitude.

Um...put me down for "yes please."

[djmxtc]

Same here.
We plan to buy VbulletinBoard, but only if we find a way to import our Ikonboard database (posts and members)...
Would be sad to lose all 6500 posts

[FishFan]

Actually, an importer from ikonboard version 3 to vBulletin would probably make the deal for me (ie the sugar on top, the sweetner, the icing on the cake). I think you get the picture. Basically, it would "cream the Twinkie".

While I wouldn't ask it to bear my children, I would probably definitely purchase your product if I could get my hands on a converter.

[JamesUS]

Which databases are you running iB 3 on (ie DBM, MySQL or pgSQL)?

[djmxtc]

I use DBM so far... if I don´t change to VBB I will kepp Ikonboard and switch to MySQL.

[Simms]

I'm running on MySQL.

[FishFan]

MySQL, as well....

[Simms]

I admit that mine is only one voice, and my particular brand of desperation may or may not be typical, so take this however you wish, but....

I know that any "official" converters that you guys make available are a "bonus", and that you are under no obligation to provide them. That's your choice, and I understand and respect that. But at the same time, the cost of vB being what it is (and I'm not saying it's expensive), the fact of the matter is that I would doubt that it is the *first* choice of BBS systems among vast numbers of low-key, small, or non-commercial sites. One could likely infer, then, that many, if not most, of the sites that would fall into those categories have gone through at least one, if not several different forum software packages during the life of their site.

I run a very small, niche sports site, with less than 50 regular users....however we have amassed nearly 45,000 forum posts in our 10 months of existence, which, unfortunately, have been spread out across one ezBoard, one YaBB forum, and our current ikonboard forum. Quite simply, one of my primary goals is to eventually be able to have ALL those posts in ONE forum. I make no money off my site, but to me, the ability to convert our ezBoard threads alone made your product worth the $85 (soon to be $160) to me. And I'll be perfectly honest...the ONLY reason I decided to buy it was so that I could have those posts stored in a db which I would then be able to convert to a *different* forum (iow, I had little intention of continuing to use vB on a permanent basis).

You should also know that I've changed course with regards to that particular direction...even though we're not actively using it yet, my users love the look and feel of vB, and as an admin, I drool more and more as I continue to explore and find more features. Thus, I will gladly fork over the additional $85 for an owned license (once my tax refund gets here ).

All that said, I have spent the last several days trying to contact people I know who have experience with php and MySQL to see if I could actually PAY somebody to write a conversion script for me on a freelance basis....it's worth *that* much to me.

All of which is another way of saying that, while your unique ability to import ezBoard data is a tremendous selling point, I think you'd find that adopting a practice of making converters regularly available for *all* of the major "players" in the BBS market would be an even greater selling point. I would have gladly payed twice the licensing fee had I known I had that luxury ahead of time. As it is, I have to be content with ezBoard conversion (and I am, don't get me wrong), and then simply hope and pray that either an "official" or "unofficial" converter will eventually come out that meets my particular needs (or find somebody else who's willing to do it for a price).

I understand that these scripts take time, and are not easy to write...if they were, I'd probably do it myself. And I know that this argument has been hashed out probably more than a few times on these forums in the past. But from a business standpoint, I'm just reiterating that it *might* not be a terrible idea to consider. (fwiw, I also know that I'm probably in the minority here. )

Anyway, apologies for the long, and off-topic (for this thread) post. Just my $0.02.

[Freddie Bingham]

Thanks for the comments.

If you check around you will see that we can import the most varied sorts of forums of all the forum packages. We are always thinking about the needs of writing new importers. We also have to consider the return on investment though. While it may be easy enough to write an importer for every package out there, there are costs involved. Jelsoft has to look at how many potential users will purchase the product because of the new importer. If we don't feel it would be many, than we do not allot the time to create the importer. We are also in a bind in terms of free packages as we have a moral dilemma regarding the potential user. How many will choose to purchase our product and upgrade vs. how many will choose to pirate it instead. It also becomes an extreme chore to maintain 10 importers through all the various modifications the host forums go through. We are looking at bringing on someone to handle just importer creation and maintenance so that the developers can stick to what they love to do, and that is work on vBulletin itself.

The issue with Ikonboard in particular is that we just expended the time to create the 2.19 importer and now we can not just tweak it a bit to import 3.0. That would be a whole new entity and we need to know what percentage of our possible audience is using 2.19 vs. how many are using v3.0 vs. how many are wishing to come to us out of those two possibilities.

I do say if you did settle on vBulletin to begin with than you would not likely be jumping around to various other software packages as your path seems to have taken you.

[JamesUS]

There will hopefully be an importer for ikonboard 3 available in the near-ish future (ie the next couple of weeks).

[Simms]

I can't find the "we're not worthy" smiley.

Thank you. You guys (and gals, if there are any on the dev team) rule.

[JamesUS]

Actually, do Ikonboard (or ibhackers) provide a way to convert a DBM forum to MySQL?

[Simms]

In a manner of speaking, yes. I've never tried it, so I can't say for sure how well it works, but there is functionality built into the iB admin control panel that lets the admin switch between db drivers (DBM, MySQL, or pgSQL).

[JamesUS]

Thanks for letting me know writing an importer for three seperate formats is difficult, so that feature in iB will really help when developing the importer.