[Ray Konopka]

I am trying to import the forums and topics from our existing phpBB forums. There are about a dozen forums, and about 400 topics and 1600 posts. I have set the values on the Import Forums page to the following:

Select Platform = phpBB
Database Server = mssql2.<hostingdomain>.com
Database Port = 3306
Database Name = <name of the database>
Database Username = <admin user>
Database Password = <password>
Table Prefix = phpbb_

However, when I start the conversion, it reports “No forums to convert”, “No forum parents to convert”, and so on.

I do not get any errors when I run the conversion. The existing phpBB forums are in a MSSQL database and not a MySQL database. I suspect that this may be the reason nothing is discovered.

Any help would be appreciated.

Ray
bbPress Version 2.5.14
WordPress 4.9.6 running Divi theme

[sdeeds]

Because here is a reference to it from 5 years ago:

phpBB import username issue

and I can confirm that it is happening because of bbpress, though I don’t understand why.

[matrixino]

Hello,
I migrated from phpBB to bbPress recently. My forum has ~1Million posts. My postmeta table is 30GB.
Is there anything I can do to shrink it?
I noticed there are many lines for every post like _bbp_old_xxxx, which i suspect comes from migration.
It’s safe to delete all those records with _old_ in it? Or anything else? 30GB seems quite too much even for that amount of posts, compared to the old phpbb db size…

[Stephen Edgar]

Checkout the phpBB converter, it’s one of the best example implementations.

Use _bbp_old_topic_id to grab your old topic id:
https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/includes/admin/converters/phpBB.php#L183

p.s. The above phpBB converter uses bbPress 2.6 alpha which has many new refinements for the importer over bbPress 2.5, I’d suggest you use bbPress 2.6 alpha for any imports due to those improvements, it can be found here https://bbpress.org/download (bbPress.org and wordpress.org both use bbPress 2.6)

[saulmayo]

I wanted to know if you can help me.

I get to import everything except the users.

I’m trying to import a phpBB3.2.2 to bbPress.
I’ve tried with bbPress 2.5.14, bbPress 2.6 RC5 and bbPress 2.6 beta2.
I’ve tried in the 3 modes with the phpBB.php of dintintos topics but none of them work for me;
– https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/includes/admin/converters/phpBB.php
– https://gist.github.com/pixelnated/5c27a64c450578440554ba902560178f

I’m desperate. could you help me?

[jameshogan03]

Bbpress users and developers,

After creating my bbpress forum I was disappointed to find there is no easy way to get full functionality (notifications etc) on smartphone, since tapatalk cut ties with wordpress.

I have found a new application called Topic’it, who have established compatibility with Forumotion and PHPbb software. Their app appears in both the android and ios app stores, and is essentially the same proposed thing as tapatalk.

They are searching for people to create plugins to make their app compatible with more forum platforms. They have given me permission to access their API, so I’m going to attempt this as a solo project, but it will take me time as I’m a computer hobbyist and not a developer in any way.

For the love of Bbpress, let someone more adept than me get over there and give it a shot!

Of course I’ll share my work here if I manage to connect.

[irishhealer]

I’ve tried the import using 2.6-RC5 and all I get when trying to import my phpbb 3.2.2 forum is

Stopped

Continuing Import…

So it tries to import for a second and then it stops without error.

[d d]

Just in case anyone is interested, I added to my BuddyPress support thread. Still no reply, but here’s what I found…

I’m seeing the pattern now. Even in forums more than a decade old (and before @ mentions became a feature on many sites), people used @username even if it did nothing. This was simply shorthand for getting a specific person’s attention in a thread with many participants.

Looks as though BuddyPress is trying to be smart and pull these @ mentions from old content and add them to the activity stream. Since it’s a new addition to the activity stream, BuddyPress also thinks it’s new and therefore sends out an email notification. This is why it only affects old members.

Now… How do stop it?

Stopping notifications across the board is not a good idea. Even if I do it now and turn it back on later, we’ll never know when an old member might join us again. So really the only solution is to have BuddyPress stop importing old forum posting with the ‘@’ character into a new activity.
Still open to suggestions. Thanks.

After import of phpBB, sending notifications to users on very old replies

[d d]

I had an old WP site that came back to life. It was running phpBB and I successfully imported everything to bbPress. In the new site, we are also using BuddyPress. Old users are reporting that they are now getting email notifications on replies from posts many years old.

Thoughts? Ideas?

[dheerajsharma14]

Hi all,

have gone through numerous posts on the issues of importing phpbb to bbpress. I have been using the latest RC version of bbpress. I am using latest version of WP and phpbb 3.0.11

I have tried cleaning, repairing, resetting and trying again. Nothing works. It shows everything as 0 items to import, no forum, no topics. Only it imports replies without anything else.

Any help will be appreciated. I really want to move away from phpbb forum 🙁

[lantaarntje]

This fix indeed has the intention to convert my phpbb3.2 forum to bbpress 2.6 beta 2 😉 The conversion is still running so i don’t know for sure 😛 #goodjob

[ladolce]

Want to know if it’s possible to use bbprss like phpbb where you can set userpermissions to access certain files. We have a site where it is a forum but there is a section where users and subscribe and be able to download files that are on certain posts. It this possible to setup the same as this site – http://www.plasmaspider.com ?
Thanks

[jimblais]

I replaced the phpBB converter code as above and when I run it, it finds nothing. It runs through but does not create forums nor topics, etc. Please advise.

[TiiuK]

Long story short this didn’t work either and I was wondering if the domain redirect is a problem (when you browse to the phpBB forums you get redirected to a subforum).

[Stephen Edgar]

Can you try using the following version:
• https://gist.github.com/pixelnated/5c27a64c450578440554ba902560178f

Via https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/fix-for-phpbb3-to-bbpress-conversion-script/

[pixelnated]

No dice with bbPress 2.6-beta-2 either 🙁
No biggie – I’ll just rollback and get it done. I like where it is heading with all the additional info though

WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘users.id’ in ‘field list’]
SELECT convert(users.id USING “utf8mb4”) AS id,convert(users.password USING “utf8mb4”) AS password,convert(users.salt USING “utf8mb4”) AS salt,convert(users.username USING “utf8mb4”) AS username,convert(users.email USING “utf8mb4”) AS email,convert(users.www USING “utf8mb4”) AS www,convert(users.r_time USING “utf8mb4”) AS r_time,convert(users.aim USING “utf8mb4”) AS aim,convert(users.yim USING “utf8mb4”) AS yim,convert(users.icq USING “utf8mb4”) AS icq,convert(users.msn USING “utf8mb4”) AS msn,convert(users.gmail USING “utf8mb4”) AS gmail,convert(users.sig USING “utf8mb4”) AS sig,convert(users.location USING “utf8mb4”) AS location,convert(users.users_text USING “utf8mb4”) AS users_text FROM phpbb3_users AS users LIMIT 0, 250

No users to convert

No data to clean

Starting Conversion

[Stephen Edgar]

@pixelnated, if you use the version here it includes a bunch of other enhancements 🙂
• https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/src/includes/admin/converters/phpBB.php

[pixelnated]

Since I was helping a friend convert a phpbb2 board to phpbb3 I thought I’d take the time to also import the forums into bbpress (my preference).
I initially tried the import but could not get it to work and after looking on the forums saw that I was not alone.
To get the import to work I had to remap some fields in the phpbb conversion script and comment out some obsolete ones (took about 30 minutes.

If anyone needs to get your PHPBB3 users and forums converted in BBPress you can replace the phpBB.php file in wp-content\plugins\bbpress\includes\admin\converters to match the following updated code: https://gist.github.com/pixelnated/a7a9c41154cf64696ddd1c2e4f4327ed

[Stephen Edgar]

@tiiuk did you select phpBB from the dropdown and enter the correct database prefix?

[TiiuK]

Thanks guys, I had the latest bbPress installed but my converter.php looked different so now I am using the converter.php file which Stephen posted and did not do any change to it. Then I tried the phpBB3 import again but know I am stuck at “Starting conversion” … it just won’t stop and there is no error message. How can I finally get this to work?

[Stephen Edgar]

@jwk, I’ve moved this to its own topic as this does NOT affect all of bbPress.

This will be specific to whatever import process of importer you are using.

What are you importing and where from @jkw217? phpBB? a raw database?

[matevoun]

Salutations,

Je viens de découvrir cette extension…
C’est TERRIBLE ! 😉

Moi qui comptait installer un phpBB… Problème résolu.

Par contre, j’ai 2/3 questions :
– Mon site WP est plus un site “carte de visite”, sans articles, juste des pages. Personne ne s’inscrit donc. Comment faire dans ce cas pour ouvrir en écriture le forum au public (sans être anonymes) ?
– Le thème du forum est lié au thème WP ou on peut le changer indépendamment ?
– Comment se passe les sauvegardes du forum ? (pérennité.)
– Comment l’intégrer au site WP ? Un lien menu ?

Merci de votre aide…

[lantaarntje]

The converter won’t start? I try to make a test conversion from phpbb3 3.2 but nothing happens when i click start 😮

[xatanael]

Hello,

I just want to import my phpBB forum (version 3.2.0) to BBpress. I tried with “tools/import” but it doesn’t work. The tools didn’t import a single forum or topic.

How can I do this?

Another question : how can I increase the size of the font in BBpress? I would have the same size as this forum, on wordpress.org. The original size is really too small.

Thanks a lot.

[vamshidhar]

I am trying to import data from phpBB 3.2.1 to bbPress 2.6 RC 3. I am working on my local machine.
It is converting Forums, Topics and Replies but Users are not getting imported. Author column is showing as Anonymous.

While importing below error is showing up

WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_wlm’ in ‘field list’]
SELECT convert(users.user_id USING “utf8mb4”) AS user_id,convert(users.user_password USING “utf8mb4”) AS user_password,convert(users.user_form_salt USING “utf8mb4”) AS user_form_salt,convert(users.username USING “utf8mb4”) AS username,convert(users.user_email USING “utf8mb4”) AS user_email,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_website USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_website,convert(users.user_regdate USING “utf8mb4”) AS user_regdate,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_aol USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_aol,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_yahoo USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_yahoo,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_icq USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_icq,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_wlm USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_wlm,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_facebook USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_facebook,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_googleplus USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_googleplus,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_skype USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_skype,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_twitter USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_twitter,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_youtube USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_youtube,convert(users.user_jabber USING “utf8mb4”) AS user_jabber,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_occupation USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_occupation,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_interests USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_interests,convert(users.user_sig USING “utf8mb4”) AS user_sig,convert(profile_fields_data.pf_phpbb_location USING “utf8mb4”) AS pf_phpbb_location,convert(users.user_avatar USING “utf8mb4”) AS user_avatar FROM phpbb_users AS users LEFT JOIN phpbb_profile_fields_data AS profile_fields_data USING (user_id) WHERE users.user_type !=2 LIMIT 0, 100