@netweb, would you do me the favor of deleting the download link I posted 10 posts up please? Thanks 🙂
It doesn’t look like it, but does bbPress have it’s own XML importer available? Again, I’ve successfully converted my phpBB3 forums onto my local bbPress, and now I’m unsure how to get those posts onto my live site. Would I just export the bbPress tables from my local database and import them into my live site’s database?
@manuxel Exactly 100% what you wrote there except my case was phpBB now look where we are at 🙂
You should see Starting conversion in seconds.
Next Converting users in another second if your converting your users.
Next ‘Converting forums` in seconds if not converting users.
By default everything is done in chunks of 100 records and this should never really take much longer than 5 seconds per chunk at which point you will see the converter message progress to Converting topics 300 - 399 then Converting topics 400 - 499 etc, you should never be far away from a new message informing you of the status of the import.
I’ll try to get some more docs into the ‘import screen’ for bbPress 2.5 to give people a heads up on what they should expect to see.
As you are on a dedicated server this topic might be worth checking out on ‘speeding it up’
phpBB Import speed
Firstly though lets get it started…
Via FTP grab a copy of your SMF Settings.php file and open it up in a text editor.
/public_html/mywebsite/smf/Settings.php
In that file something that looks like this:
########## Database Info ##########
$db_type = 'mysql';
$db_server = 'localhost';
$db_name = 'mydb_name';
$db_user = 'mydb_usernam';
$db_passwd = '123456789';
$ssi_db_user = '';
$ssi_db_passwd = '';
$db_prefix = 'smf_';
These are the settings you need to use on the bbPress importer.
ps. Thanks @manuxel for helping others out here with the SMF importer 🙂
Greetings all,
I am not sure even if it is possible, but I thought I seen that one could use an importer from phpbb to bbpress. Right now I use the wp-united but it seems that things are not being kept up. So am considering the transition. Is there such an importer? Stephen @netweb maybe you could help me with this? Or anyone in that matter. Part of my site is:
JosephStory Support Group
Will this be a difficult transition? Will I loose a lot?
Thanks to everyone willing to help and inform.
Joseph
OK. I logged out manually and relogged in. Seems that it’s working now, we’ll see…
I’ll report later.
Thanks
You should be able to logout log back in again (just to forcibly confirm that with WordPress), enter the same details on the bbPress import settings you used 5,000/0.2 etc and just click ‘Start’ and it will resume from where it left off.
I did what suggested. Going 5000 locally with 0.2 seemed to work fine. However I got again the “dashes” problem. And I was still logged in when it happened (auto-refreshing my admin page). Also stopping and restarting the import, it just continue giving dashes like this:
-----Starting Conversion-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Converting replies (425000 - 429999)
Converting replies (420000 - 424999)
Where it says starting conversion is where i stopped/restarted it. In the try of my first post it also started giving dashes around the 450000th post.
What can I do?
Typically the ----- dashes occur once you are no longer logged into your site, opening up another page and refreshing it every 2-3 hours eg. http://example.com/wp-admin/index.php should get you around this issue.
As long as you don’t hit memory issues drop the delay time from the default 1 second down to 0.1.
I’d have at a guess the 5,000 & 10,000 settings you tried might have actually been too much, I’d love to be able to get some more SQL debug messages into the output display though to achieve this much of the importer needs to be rewritten so that will happen in a future release.
Down the track I’d like to write some bash scripts to do this directly (using WP-CLI) but this is a way down the track and is not planned at this stage.
Anyone? I’m really having trouble importing… I even tried locally (i7-4770k/16GB/SSD) and it’s taking ages 🙁
Hi all. I’m having some problems importing my phpBB forum into bbPress. My forum is quite big, those are my stats:
Posts: 576133 | Topics: 32722 | Users: 12306
I first tried a default import with 1000row/1sec setting. It ran for an entire day, however after around 60000 posts it just started giving me dashes (‘-‘ char) and I really didn’t know what to do or if it was normal. So i just stopped it.
After this I wanted to try more rows, assuming it was going to be faster. So I started (2 tries) a 5000 and a 10000 row imports. However I had it on starting conversion for an hours or more, and never actually started converting. I don’t have memory problems or errors, it’s just very slow I guess.
So my question is: Is there a way to import all together, maybe directly with some bash script, from shell without using a webserver. Or something else to speed it up instead of waiting days in my browser?
Thanks.
What stage do you get to though now?
It just imported nothing. I will try again today.
Same problem, it’s just hanging.
What stage do you get to though now?
(As you shouldn’t be seeing “Delete users WordPress default passwords Deleting previously converted data” etc)
“Deleting Conversion Table… Failed”
This is fine, it just depends on if bbPress used a conversion table to do the conversion or it used the source database tables correctly.
As well as the actual users there are a lot of bots etc. (e.g. AdsBot Google, Ask Jeeves Bot)
These are special phpBB user accounts that I haven’t found a way to ignore importing just yet and must be manually removed after importing, see the follwing for a list of them all.
https://codex.bbpress.org/import-forums/phpbb/
Finally got it sorted and was able to convert the phpbb3 forum into my local bbPress forum! I did indeed find an error involving the portal that was hitching me up on installing on my local server, but there is a possibility that I was making another mistake: I may have been telling the importer that the table prefix was phpbb3_ instead of phpbb_, since there are tables of both and I did not know that. I’m not sure if I was doing that or not.
So now do I export my bbPress tables from my local site using mysql and import them into my live site’s database?
I imported a huge forum from PHPBB (Over 1M posts and 100K users). It’s very slow to load and submit posts. Any suggestions on the indexes that should be created? It doesn’t look like the default BBPress indexes are sufficient for forums this size. I thought BBPress would be able to handle it with it’s default structure. Thanks in advance.
Hey There,
Is there a more up-to-date suggestion regarding BBPress and Indexes? I imported a huge forum from PHPBB (over 1M posts + 100K users) and it’s very slow! Any suggestions on how to optimize all of the tables?
Thanks!
I would say you’re spot on Bobby. 2 years down the line from this thread and I’m beggared if I can find clear, concise documentation on how to install and activate a simple bbpress theme. I just don’t get the point of spending all this time and effort to create forum software and then refuse to properly help people to use it. Like you said, more people will just give up than actually install and use at this rate.
I can honestly say it was easier to integrate phpbb3 with wordpress using a complex modification than it is to properly set up a bbpress forum, which is meant to be seamless.
Might be time to look for another solution if this is the future. Not wishing to be snappy and I know this is free software, of which I’m sure we’re all appreciative, but this has to be one of the most frustrating installs I’ve ever encountered.
Also, are there steps to manually import phpbb.
This problem was resolved. But I have been trying to import the phpbb v3.### since with no luck. I get to a point and it starts putting out ———- with no text explanation. It does this for hours. Any suggestions?
Thanks Stephen
I tried again as suggested. Manually deleted previous suer import, reset forums, did not check purge previous
Same problem, it’s just hanging.
A couple of things I noticed, on the reset its is all successful except:
“Deleting Conversion Table… Failed”
As well as the actual users there are a lot of bots etc. (e.g. AdsBot Google, Ask Jeeves Bot)
Before importing I had pruned phpbb users down to only actual users with minimum 1 post, so i don’t understand where those bots are coming from. They certainly don’t show up in a search on phpbb forum for users.
Thanks for the update, if I get time I might take a peek at the ‘Kiss Portal’ mod for phpBB, it would be nice to finally get your forums imported into bbPress after soooooo much time. It took me a good 6 months to get my original site from phpBB to bbPress and now I write all the forum converters 😉
Do not check the following setting:
Purge Previous Import Purge all information from a previously attempted import
Do check the following setting:
Start Over Start a fresh conversion from the beginning
There is something weird going on with the above that ‘Purge Previous Import’ setting that I am looking into, it works for some and not others and is really bugging me 🙁
In between imports if it doesn’t finish and you need to try again you will manually have to delete the imported users from the WordPress User admin panel and reset bbPress’ forums as per https://codex.bbpress.org/reset-forums/.
after you get this, you need to do a repair
Yes, I did the repairs, all of them – it made no difference.
sometimes there will appear to be a forum with 70 topics, but on the fornt page only a forum with 0 topics.
after you get this, you need to do a repair
tools>forums and as yours is a small database I’d just click all of them
Happy to hear(read) that, and I envy you, I tried converting my SMF to phpbb first and didn’t work 🙁
Anyway, congratulations, enjoy this beautiful piece of software.
Thanks everyone! Its all sorted.
I first converted to phpbb and from there i converted to bbpress 🙂
Now just playing with bbpress feeling exited and happy!!
