[Josh Leuze]

Hi sbricchiLIN, I did come up with a solution to migrate a forum from YAF to bbPress.

But I had to do a 3 step migration to do it: YetAnotherForum to vBulletin to phpBB to bbPress.

It’s a tedious process, and not perfect, but I got the forums converted!

Basically, in all my research the only converter for YetAnotherForum.NET that I could find it vBulletin. So that’s the first step. unfortunately it is commercial, and closed source, but a $100 is much cheaper than paying someone to convert it for you!

vBulletin has a tool called ImpEx that can import a YAF forum into vBulletin. But it is tricky since YAF uses MSSQL, and you want to convert to MySQL on vBulletin. I did all this on my local machine running Windows, with a MSSQL server to run the YAF database and WAMP to run vBulletin.

I did not have YAF installed locally and running, just the database. You probably want to get your YAF forums running on a local Windows machine as a first step. The YAF to vBulletin importer is old and totally unsupported, so it is crude, but better than nothing. I was only able to import about 80% of my forum content, and I lost a user account. But one user out of 600 seemed a small price to pay.

I think the loses were due to funky characters and long titles, so if you have a local install of YAF, you can fix those things before you import.

After you get the data into vBulletin, it is a much smoother process. There is of course a lot of converters for phpBB, and converting from phpBB to bbPress is pretty easy.

In the end, the migration went ok, I had some issues with the HTML code in the posts, had to convert some characters in the database, and install some plugins so that the HTML content in the old posts would work in bbPress. But it was all worth it to get away from YAF, the forum members all seem to be happy with the new forum, no complaints, just a few feature requests.

I have really been meaning to do several blog posts explaining how to do all this cause it’s one hell of a project, but who ever has the time to do everything they want to?

If anyone else takes the plunge and tries to migrate from YAF to bbPress and has any specific questions, let me know and I’d be happy to try and give a hand!