[Tom Dyer]

Hi @netweb, thanks for the response. I’ve gathered some more information to elaborate on the issues…

Stickies – the issue here seems to be that the phpBB stickies and announcements have all been imported as ‘super stickies’. There is actually a lot more than 20 posts (my estimate in the original post was waaay out – there was actually about 100 when I went in to un-stick them). These might have been fine had they imported as normal stickies – but having them as super-stickies had a hug impact on forum pages load times.

User import – I thought at the time that it was probably a conflict with username and/or ID but having looked at the posts I’ve adopted, they are all from different users. I have 62 forum topics/replies under my name but looking at the live site, the original authors of these are all different users which makes no sense to me. What’s more is, I haven’t adopted all of the users posts, just like one or two from each user…

…Following on, I now wonder if these are posts that should have been assigned to the ‘Anonymous’ user because I think I may have deleted that user at some point not realising it was a result of the import… I’ll add it back in and see if it fixes my problem.

I didn’t realise that adding a moderators only forum was that easy… I’ve been working with RobinW to integrate the bbp-private-groups plugin, maybe I don’t need that after all.

Repair Tools – our forum has imported 72 Forums, 71,007 Topics, and 564,453 Replies. It’s a fairly large one, but I think I’ve heard of larger forums being imported into bbPress…

User login – I haven’t used a plugin for this, I’ve written it myself. It just does a simple ajax call using the admin-ajax and then calls wp_signon() to attempt to log you in. It’s a fairly simple one, I just need to know which hooks bbPress is using to run the conversions on and hopefully I can just call that action before/after trying to log them in.

[Stephen Edgar]

Forum import – The documentation states that stickies will not be imported, however I after doing the import I have around 20 ‘super-stickies’ which, looking at the old forum, are a mixture of announcements and stickies. I’d rather these weren’t converted to anything, and as far as I’m aware they shouldn’t be (https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2126)

The above ticket you reference was the ‘issue’ being created to track the changes and progress of implementing this feature.

In comment 12 that is where the ticket was to updated to ‘fixed’ and ‘closed’ via changeset r5170. Trac can be a little daunting at first trying to understand everything that goes on in a ticket 😉

With only your ~20 ‘stcikies’ it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to ‘unstick’ the ones you do not want after your import has finished and the repair tools run.

I have updated the docs to reflect that also https://codex.bbpress.org/import-forums/phpbb/

Stickies – is there a way to ignore stickies during the import? They don’t appear to have come through correctly so it would be nice to simply ignore them (as was previously the case).

How so, could you explaing that a little more please? Do the topics ‘look right’ and are just not ‘stuck’ or something else going on?

User import – During the import, I (the main WordPress admin user) seem to have had quite a lot of forums, topics and replies linked to my user. I wasn’t a user on the previous phpBB forum at all so I’m not sure why I’ve adopted these posts. Or any posts for that matter.

If there is a username match the importer will try to match the posts being imported with any current WordPress user, thus if phpBB has a user named ‘admin’ and you use the default the default WordPress username ‘admin’ that will be the cause.

The best work around for this would be to rename the phpBB username in the database bvefore importing.

Users – looking at the phpbb data, the amount of imported users seemed to match up, but I wonder if I’ve been assigned posts that were previously changed to the ‘Anonymous User’ that phpBB has at user ID 0… the amount of posts don’t seem to match up with that theory but a ‘majority’ of the posts that have been assigned to me seem to match the logic to an extent (ie, posts that have been moved into a ‘moderators only’ forum for further discussion about actions to be taken).

You should notice that you now actually have a WordPress username ‘Anonymous’, so any ‘Anonymous’ posts should be attributed to that user.

Your ‘moderators only’ forum after import you should change the bbPress forum permission to ‘hidden’ and that will make that forum the equiv bbPress ‘moderators only’ forum.

Repair tools – All the repair tasks seem to work ok, except for two:
– Recalculate the position of each reply
– Remap existing users to default forum roles
These two tasks end up white-screening with no status messages at all.

What size is the phpBB database your importing? (Approx. Forums, Topics, Posts & Users please 🙂 )

User Login Conversion – User logins are converted correctly when using the standard wordpress login screen but now when using my custom frontend ajax login – does anyone know if there’s a way to get that to work? A seperate topic has been started about that here: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/user-login-authentication-migrated-phpbb-users/

I’ve pretty much still got the same opinion as I wrote last night here.

User Login – that’s correct – I’m just using the wp-signon method so I guess I’ll need to add some kind of do_action() call or something to trigger the conversion? If you can point me in the right direction, that would be great 🙂

There is nothing to point you to sorry, when a user logs in for the first time after the import their legacy salt and hash password get’s converted to the native WordPress password format. Without knowing each legacy password their is no way to do this programmatically.

bbPress’ login forms actually are hooked into the WordPress login forms, so theoretically it shouldn’t be too difficult for either the plugin you are using to add support for bbPress or possibly look for another similar plugin that already supports bbPress.

Passwords and all their associated algorithms are hard and this an area where I just manage to skate by with the basics, actually doing any of what I mentioned in the previous paragraph is way beyond my skill level and pay grade 😉

[Stephen Edgar]

@fasttimes Do you have any custom phpBB custom mods installed that may change some things in the phpBB database? I just tested my phpBB imports and they all worked fine, no errors for ‘reply_to parents’. In fact phpBB does not have ‘threaded replies’ included by default thus the reason I ask.

[Tom Dyer]

Thanks,

Stickies – is there a way to ignore stickies during the import? They don’t appear to have come through correctly so it would be nice to simply ignore them (as was previously the case).

Users – looking at the phpbb data, the amount of imported users seemed to match up, but I wonder if I’ve been assigned posts that were previously changed to the ‘Anonymous User’ that phpBB has at user ID 0… the amount of posts don’t seem to match up with that theory but a ‘majority’ of the posts that have been assigned to me seem to match the logic to an extent (ie, posts that have been moved into a ‘moderators only’ forum for further discussion about actions to be taken).

User Login – that’s correct – I’m just using the wp-signon method so I guess I’ll need to add some kind of do_action() call or something to trigger the conversion? If you can point me in the right direction, that would be great 🙂

Thanks for your help

[Stephen Edgar]

Cool, whack your issues here and I’ll check than out tomorrow.

Quick answers:

– stickies are now converted so I’ll update the docs for that.

– Repair tools, as I stated in the other thread shouldn’t do this, will look closer tomorrow

– Users is odd, seems maybe some users aren’t getting imported, job for tomorrow also

– User login, bbPress doesn’t actually convert the phpBB password until the migrated user logs in for the first time. This will most likely be the issue in that the ajax login is stepping around this. Presumably after an imported user has logged in and their password converted the Ajax login will work.

[Tom Dyer]

Brilliant, thanks @netweb. I’ve actually started my own which is related to this (as well as a few other issues) here:

phpBB Import Error(s)

I’m happy to edit my post and link to this topic in regards to the repair tasks (if that’s preferable to you?) but there are other parts to my new topic that are not related to this single issue.

[Tom Dyer]

Hi,

After reading the importer
I’ve recently migrated my phpBB forum to bbPress, but I have noted a few issues with the import/repair process. Does anybody have any suggestions as to what’s going wrong with any/all of these:

Forum import – The documentation states that stickies will not be imported, however I after doing the import I have around 20 ‘super-stickies’ which, looking at the old forum, are a mixture of announcements and stickies. I’d rather these weren’t converted to anything, and as far as I’m aware they shouldn’t be (https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2126)

User import – During the import, I (the main WordPress admin user) seem to have had quite a lot of forums, topics and replies linked to my user. I wasn’t a user on the previous phpBB forum at all so I’m not sure why I’ve adopted these posts. Or any posts for that matter.

Repair tools – All the repair tasks seem to work ok, except for two:
– Recalculate the position of each reply
– Remap existing users to default forum roles
These two tasks end up white-screening with no status messages at all.

User Login Conversion – User logins are converted correctly when using the standard wordpress login screen but now when using my custom frontend ajax login – does anyone know if there’s a way to get that to work? A seperate topic has been started about that here: http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/user-login-authentication-migrated-phpbb-users/

Any advice on any of these steps would be very much appreciated.
Thanks!

[Stephen Edgar]

Argh! I missed this original topic, sorry 🙁

phpBB does not actually have ‘threaded replies’ so you should see something more laong the lines of ‘No reply to’s to convert’ it most certainly should not be failing at that 11th step.

Nor should it be ‘white screening’ for either “Recalculate the position of each reply” or “Remap existing users to default forum roles” tasks.

I’m done for the night (9:30pm Local Time) so I’ll take a closer look at this tomorrow 🙂

[itisix]

I’ve been using wordpress for about 6 months now and I’m using the “luminescent lite” theme. I now decided it was time to move my old phpbb board over to bbpress and I’m struggling a bit with the design. So:

1 – The theme is universal, so not much chance to change much without hard coding or a new theme

2 – I use categories and forums and it’s messy. I get:

Category
Forum nº 1 (14,54) Forum nº 2 /1,445 4,754)

Can I add a paragraph for each forum or even not show the forums at all (they would open on a click on the category).

3 – No “unread topics” display (icon/different colour)

Not all is bad. I’m using buddypress and I’m loving it. BBpress ported quite well from phpbb3 and I lost no data at all (except PM’s). Even BBcode is looking good. My users are giving me a hard time, but they are just idiots anyway… lol

[itisix]

Hi,

I’ve been running wordpress for a few months and I now was confident enough to move my phpbb to bbpress. All went very smooth.
Problem is, the theme I use (and that I like a lot) is not very bbpress friendly.

I don’t suppose I can change the bbpress part too much without some hard coding, so any suggestion would be useful (probably change the theme altogether?). Any theme suggested?

My site is http://www.smartistas.com and the theme is luminescente lite.

Thanks

[Tom Dyer]

Hi,

I’ve recently migrated a large forum from phpBB to bbPress using the import tool (which has gone extremely smoothly – so thanks to all who have worked on the importer tools!)
Users have been imported successfully, and I can login via wp-admin with the password that was used on the previous phpBB forum… All of that is glorious! 😀

On our site however, I’ve created an ajax login so visitors never have to get in via /wp-admin
The issue I’m having is that whatever code is used to check a users old password and convert it to a WordPress encoded password is not being run when I attempt to log a user in via wp_signon().

Is there a filter or something I can run to ensure that bbPress runs the password conversion when a user logs in via my ajax login prompt?

[Stephen Edgar]

It is pretty tricky to do by hand, actually I have never down it for more than one or two posts to verify the integrity of bbPress’ repair tools. The repair tools pretty much deletes everything relating to the ‘last activity’ and recreates it from scratch, this is why I think maybe your import didn’t import everything accurately the first time.

If you have only just performed the import I’d suggest setting up a test site and do the import again and ‘play’ around there and see if it then works, if so redo your import on your main site.

Also, it was phpBB v3 you imported from?

[Kaluh]

Hi guys,

I have a problem with my freshness, some of the forums are set correctly but some are not.
someone has an idea what it can be ? something like an ID problem or something.

i used the “Recalculate last activity in each topic and forum” repair tool but that didnt help alot.

my forum is build up like:

Forum/Subforum/Topic

the point where the freshness goes wrong is from Subforum to Forum.

i hope anyone can help

Kind regards,

Niek

[Robin W]

ok, I think your best bet is to start a fresh topic called something like “conversion from phpbb issues” and repeat the text of your first post.

I would then hope that Stephen Edgar who is the conversion expert will pick this up.

He’ll probably not spot this post as it now is quite long

[Kaluh]

this is a conversion of a phpbb forum.

but what’s weird is that he does some correct and some incorrect.

this problem was there from the start.
but i fixed some of it using the forum repair tool of bbpress.

[Stephen Edgar]

How do you have bbPress and Private Groups activated? Network or Per Site ?

Also as long as you ran the repair tools after importing from phpBB it shouldn’t be an issue, if you didn’t there is a chance, slim but plausible.

[Tom Dyer]

Oh, and the bbPress forums were migrated from phpBB using the import tool… I can’t see that being a factor in this particular issue, just throwing it out there 🙂

[piratescott]

Resolved. I used https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/i-have-created-a-bbpress-starter-theme-with-a-phpbb-look-and-feel/.

[Stephen Edgar]

Sorry my dump wasn’t successful in helping you out here…

Your dump was fine, it was just for quicker for me to install the plugin and have the examples included, if I wasn’t so tired the other night I would have done that in the first place and not asked. 😉

Slug vs. stub, I missed that one, I tried your version on my test install and it works !! It converted forum / topics / replies. Thanks! Couple of issues, questions, comments…

Awesome

In WPS terminology, there’s one forum made of categories. They can be nested. Along with subforums, they may contain topics with replies. One of these cats may be made the “default category” which users will be prompted with when posting in the forum frontpage, that’s ‘symposium_cats.defaultcat’. If not set, the first of the list will be the default. I’m not sure what happens if two or more cats are made default…

Cool, for example per this picture is what you are saying if I understand correctly is that I could choose the ‘Sun Dreesses’ forum to be the default forum selected when clicking ‘New Toipic’ from the WPS forums hopme page it will default to showing the ‘Sun Dresses’ forum as the destination for my topic unless I select another forum?

If that is the case then we can ignore this as we do not have that functionality in bbPress.

‘Allow new topics’ will basically close the category to new topics. Likewise, in a topic there’s a checkbox to allow new replies or close the topic.

I already implemented this for topics and partially for forums, I will fix this for forums shortly.

‘remote_addr’ is for monitoring spammers, I don’t think it deserves much interest in importing forum content as it’s mainly a short-time asset.

We do use IP addresses for Akismet and spam protection, we have some upcoming updates for this that will also take into account the users existing history on the site and from emory this can include the users IP address so I will take a look and see what can be done to add support for IPv6 as currently we only support IPv4.

I’ll go through your callback functions tomorrow, but a quick comment about values in WPS: they are either ‘on’ or anything else, possibly not set, so it’s better to revert the switch and test against the “case ‘on’” and any other “default” ?

That is what I have done for closed topics and will do the same for closed forums.

The group forum post from my demo install was converted. In the list of topics it is indicated as ‘no forum’ which is true (as per my previous post). We should either create a forum (named like the group itself for instance) or discard group forums topics altogether (WHERE symposium_topics.topic_group != 0).

phpBB has a similar sceanrio for a special sticky post, it is not assigned a forum. bbPress supports topics not having a forum so this technically doesn’t break things but we don’t have a ‘view’ that can show us topic s that are not in a forum.

I haven’t tried the WPS groups but I will create one and see what we can (or cannot) do with them.

About importing users, you raise an interesting point. I’d like to understand if this tool is a converter or an importer. Being located in a folder called /converter/ I had assumed it should work within the same WordPress install and convert it from one plugin to another, but you seem to move it towards the import of data accross platforms. Incidentally, I have been wondering why I need to fill the ‘Database Settings’ with db name / user / password / prefix, while I’m converting an existing forum within the same base. I’m happy with both, although I would tend to consider that most WP-to-WP imports will be performed within the same site…?

I would say it is more importer than converter though interchanging those terms is not much of a stretch as we do not only import stuff we also convert stuff then import :/

In total aside from WPS the only other importers that are also plugins ontop of WordPress are Mingle and SimplePress, the other 23 in most sceanarios would be a seperate database from the WordPress database. To extend the same issue I stated previously on how to handle users the same case applies, you are not explicitly limited to adding the bbPress plugin to your existing WP/WPS install and importing your data, you can also create a fresh WordPress install with a fresh database and import your data into that. So in theory we could ‘hide’ the database settings IF we knew your intented scenario before the fact. It would be nice in a future iteration to make the importer a ‘step by step wizard’ and we could then do such things and many more things to make the process a little less daunting…

The other topics I’d like to bring at some point in our discussion are the attachments and the avatars. I’m not sure yet how bbPress handles attachments, for WPS they are physically stored in a location set from the “params” tab, and displayed either online or as links (depending on a setting). As far as avatars, once WPS is deactivated they are all gone, is anything possible or is this too dependent upon the plugin the admin may install for avatars ?

There is a post in the Kunena importer thread where @cybnet has written an attachment importer with details on how to change it for your own Kunena forum. The source is here and no doubt could be adapted for WPS.

Kunena converter for bbPress 2.4

Kunena converter for bbPress 2.4

https://github.com/cybnet/kunena-attachments-to-bbpress/blob/master/kunena-attachments-to-bbpress.php

Edit: I should have added that bbPress does not include support for attachments, there is one or two plugins that do add support for attachments so I would look to using one of those and use that plugins architecture to facilitate how the attachments are handled. We’d like to support attachments in bbPress ‘one day’ though we have some bigger implementation details to work out before we have a crack at this.

Avatars are a bit trickier as bbPress nor WordPress do not support custom avatars for user profiles out of the box. There are many plugins for this so at the moment this is not something we can support. We can’t make avatar import support the hundres of avatar plugins available.

[jbuesking]

Apparently having a few broken attachments lingering from a phpbb3 to Kunena migration several years ago is what is giving me a problem now migrating attachments to bbPress.

The error I’m seeing in my logs is:

[15-May-2014 22:32:08 UTC] PHP Warning:  copy(http://www.mydomain.com/media/kunena/attachments/phpbb3/Cabs%201.jpg) [<a href='function.copy'>function.copy</a>]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
 in /home/username/public_html/dev002/kunena-attachments-to-bbpress.php on line 45

I looked to see if there was a “Kunena fix for broken attachments” script but nothing popped up yet.

[fasttimes]

Hello,

I am in the process of importing my current phpbb forum to bbPress. Most of the data seems to have migrated but Convert reply_to parents failed. So any topic with multiple pages is not formatting correctly or is missing posts.

According to the sources the migration script does the following steps:

STEP 1. Clean all tables.
STEP 2. Convert users.
STEP 3. Clean passwords.
STEP 4. Convert forums.
STEP 5. Convert forum parents.
STEP 6. Convert topics.
STEP 7. Stick topics.
STEP 8. Stick to front topics (Super Sicky).
STEP 9. Convert tags.
STEP 10. Convert replies.
STEP 11. Convert reply_to parents.

The steps from 1 through 10 were successful. Migration script failed on the 11th step.

Site that we are importing from is: http://www.ridingfeelsgood.com/forum/index.php

The phpbb forums where resynchronized prior to import.

Being imported to WP 3.9 on testing server with new theme.

Can you please offer some help to correct this.

Thanks,

[Stephen Edgar]

@zefred I hate this issue, I hit the same problem myself last week. 🙁

The root of the issue is a row (in your case the 29299th reply) in the database has some issue. What these issues are I have not been able to work out, the data looks perfect to me and for some reason it causes the import to stop. Every time I come across this issue I analyse the row from the database to try and find what the cause may be and have yet to come up with anything. It is also non forum specific so could be phpBB, vBulletin, Invision etc.

The workaround is to delete that 29299th reply from the source database and try again.

I know this is not an ideal solution but until I can identify the issue I’m unable to make the importer ‘workaround’ that invalid data. 🙁

[Stephen Edgar]

Double check your database settings, it looks like you are using phpbb for the table prefix, most likely this needs to be phpbb_.

You can check these settings by opening your phpBB config.php file and get the settings from that file:

eg.

$dbname = 'db_name';
$dbuser = 'db_user';
$dbpasswd = '1234';
$table_prefix = 'phpbb_';

[Pietmar]

WP 3,9
BBP 2.5.3
Twenty Ten
Database = 48Kb (according to PHPMYAdmin) and about 10kb exported

Tick all options in Importer. Get this: (Although I can see this Table in my database. If I repeat the process, I will get message of another Table not existing.)

Any suggestions?

Repair any missing information: Continue
WordPress database error: [Table ‘goandsta_phpb1.phpbbusers’ doesn’t exist]
SELECT convert(users.user_id USING “utf8”) AS user_id,convert(users.user_password USING “utf8”) AS user_password,convert(users.user_form_salt USING “utf8”) AS user_form_salt,convert(users.username USING “utf8”) AS username,convert(users.user_email USING “utf8”) AS user_email,convert(users.user_website USING “utf8”) AS user_website,convert(users.user_regdate USING “utf8”) AS user_regdate,convert(users.user_aim USING “utf8”) AS user_aim,convert(users.user_yim USING “utf8”) AS user_yim,convert(users.user_icq USING “utf8”) AS user_icq,convert(users.user_msnm USING “utf8”) AS user_msnm,convert(users.user_jabber USING “utf8”) AS user_jabber,convert(users.user_occ USING “utf8”) AS user_occ,convert(users.user_interests USING “utf8”) AS user_interests,convert(users.user_sig USING “utf8”) AS user_sig,convert(users.user_from USING “utf8”) AS user_from,convert(users.user_avatar USING “utf8”) AS user_avatar FROM phpbbusers AS users LIMIT 0, 100No users to convertNo data to cleanStarting Conversion

[Stephen Edgar]

Not at this stage it isn’t ‘out of the box’ you could modify the templates (in a child theme of course) and get the desired effect.

A good starting point for this is the code behind the concept of the following topic:

I have created a bbPress starter theme with a phpBB look and feel

You also reorganize some of your forum structure:

eg.
From:

-The Hunt
–Worldwide
—Los Angeles / Orange County
—New York
—Online
—SF Bay Area

To: (As unless you plan on including other planets and galaxies worldwide is kind of moot 😉

-The Hunt
–Los Angeles / Orange County
–New York
–Online
–SF Bay Area