@beerallica, thank you so very much for your detailed information.
I’m planning on converting a vbulletin 3.8 into bbPress but I’m reading all of the experiences from other folks that I’m able to find and yours seemed to be one of the most detailed ones.
How do you rate yourforum now when comparing with the old vbulletin?
Thanks.
Hey @mikebare, have you got good news regarding your migration from vbulletin to bbPress?
Thanks.
@siparker, as I just replied to @giobby’s phpBB post you should try the import with bbPress 2.6-alpha (hoping to release in the next couple of weeks).
It contains pretty big improvements around the importing and matching of users and their data. It should now correctly map any Anonymous users to bbPress’ Anonymous user though now it will include their vBulletin Anonymous user name. It also works in a similar fashion for deleted users, if the user was deleted and their posts kept, bbPress now maps these posts and usernames to its own internal Anonymous user.
Also make sure to run the repair tools after importing, it fixes up any freshness, last poster type issues if we couldn’t import that data it recalculates it for you.
Grab 2.6-alpha from https://bbpress.org/download
I’ve run in the same issue by importing into PHPBB.
You can read through my post: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/import-phpbb-wrong-authors/
If you check, you may find that some authors are displayed as anonymous because the corresponding attribute in wp_posts.post_author has no match with your wp_users.id
I’ve found out that these authors have still the old user id of the forum you are importing from (VBulletin).
I can’t guarantee the following solution will work for you, but I recommend you to create a temporary table to map your old user ids to the new wordpress ones by joinin them on the user_email attribute.
Then just update all the orphan wp_posts.post_author with the right wordpress id.
I can’t guarantee this will fix all your dirty posts.
Hi, Can you please advise how to extend the Vbulletin importer.
I know the fields i want to get and where i want them to go. but i am unsure how to add this to the import routine.
Example is to get from vbulletin the user signature (which is a simple lookup to sigparsed field in the db by userid) and insert that into an xprofile field for that user.
Secondly i ahd an issue importing which i believe was because the mycred plugin adds fields to the user table. It might be worth adding some validation of the user fields as the insert is hardcoded with the default fields.
I ran the import from vbulletin again last week and although i had a couple of issues that we could overcome easily enough such as the freshness not being correct we had one major issue
a load of posts are shown as Anonymous posters instead of the actual user.
the user that the post should ahve been atrtributed to was imported fine. and even in one case the previous post had ben quoted with an @user and this links fine to the user that should have had the post.
I think this might have been caused by the import process not being run in one go. it stalled part way through and i had to run it again.
So my question.
is there any way to rebuild posts > user relationships?
@netweb
https://github.com/siparker/bbpress-vbulletin-permalink
Also i was reading yesterday about the bbprewss changes due for the next version.
will the changes affect this rewrite set? i see bbpress replies as comments?
Here you go
http://www.coffeeblack.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/bbpress-vbulletin-permalinks-1.zip
for now it just basically replicates the permalinks that I have in Vbulletin but it puts the threads into their parent forums etc
You are welcome
Please post any changes here and ill setup the github properly so it can be updated there.
Mods admins etc please see if you can integrate this as an option in the core.
Thanks for this, I don’t think I have a copy of a vBulletin database so there might be some issues with the db schema here, I’ll try to hunt to a vB 4.2.2 database to test.
Any chance you could talk to your webhost and have the MySQL version updated?
WordPress’ minimum requirements per https://wordpress.org/about/requirements/ are WordPress also works with PHP 5.2.4+ and MySQL 5.0+ which you are using but I suspect the phpMyAdmin warning Your PHP MySQL library version 5.1.49 differs from your MySQL server version 5.0.51a. you see are probably related to this issue.
If your vBulletin database uses utf8_mb4 but your WordPress install is only using utf8 then you’ll run into issues. As Pascal pointed out with that link, you are using MySQL v5.0.x which doesn’t support utf8_mb4, only MySQL v5.5.3 and above does.
If the vBulletin database used utf8 rather than utf8mb4 then I’d expect the import to work just fine, but because of the different character sets and collation differences the only way around this I see is to resolve this by upgrading to at least MySQL v5.5.3.
For sure this would be related to the character set used.
Have you installed WordPress using the Greek language pack?
Any chance you could install WordPress using the same character set as the character set used by your Greek vBulletin install and try importing? Or maybe converting your vBulletin database to use a utf8 database?
New WordPress installs use the character set utf8_general_ci, previously WordPress would use utf8, the Greek locale your vBulletin install is using
Hello everyone,
After a fight with vbulletin and mysql i was able to (partially) import our vbulletin forum to bbpress (an estimated import time was 12 days for a full import, we decided to run such a task only for the last import that will go live) but sadly the import is totally out of sync resulting in this kind of problems:
1) Threads are posted by the wrong user
2) Replies are posted with the wrong user
3) Links to user profiles randomly missing (but possible to load by requesting the profile right away from URL)
Repairs after import were executed (with the exception of bbp-sync-all-reply-positions, it always times out even if the php execution time is set to insanely high values such as 3000 seconds).
If this is caused by the interruption of the import process just let me know right away and we will create a copy of the vbulletin database and keep a smaller set of data for our tests and then import everything once our testing is done.
The import problem was solved by erasing the thread tags and subscriptions in vbulletin, for some reason mysql was refusing to execute queries on some tags / subscriptions (encoding?). The import tho has problems and i will open another thread for this.
This thread can now be closed
I’ve narrowed this down to the fact that it seems to be an issue with the display of subforums on the main forum index page. We have quite a few subforums so generating the list of forums and subforms takes a long time.
I can’t easily cache this page because different logged in users see different forums based upon permissions. I would think that some of this would be handled with object caching, but this performance is horrendous compared to our previous vbulletin install. I love many of the features of bbpress, but having users wait four to ten seconds for a page load isn’t a good experience.
Any suggestions on how I might improve performance (other than not displaying subforums on the home forums page)? I’m using xcache and have W3 Total Cache with object caching enabled.
Hello,
I am trying to import a vbulletin 4.2.2 installation into bbpress and it fails importing the replies without leaving me errors, it just hangs and keeps posting dashes (-) into the progress logs even after stopping it and resuming.
Wordpress and bbpress versions are the latest available as of today 20th of March 2016.
Our vbulletin database has around 11000 users, 600 sub-forums, 30000 threads and around 800000 posts
As the work is being done in local before atempting it on the server i am unable to give links.
If in need of more informations let me know
Thanks in advance for the support
Regards
So I had to do a large import from vbulletin to make sure it would convert to bbPress, and everything works perfectly.
My question is this: There have been a few hundred more posts since my import on the client’s old site (current site) that I will need to import. Do I have to start over? Or will the importer just get new posts? I tried running the tool again, but it was still converting anonymous reply authors, which I killed because it didn’t seem to be needed. What would you suggest I do to move over the rest of the posts?
Hi,
I’ve been attempting to import a vBulletin4.2.1 forum to bbPress 2.5.8 (running WordPress 4.4.2) and initially had database connection issues causing no users/posts/etc being found to covert. Having resolved the problems with these server import parameters I am now receiving an unknown character set error as below:
Starting Conversion
No users to convert
WordPress database error: [Unknown character set: ‘utf8mb4’]
SELECT convert(user.userid USING “utf8mb4”) AS userid,convert(user.password USING “utf8mb4”) AS password,convert(user.salt USING “utf8mb4”) AS salt,convert(user.username USING “utf8mb4”) AS username,convert(user.email USING “utf8mb4”) AS email,convert(user.homepage USING “utf8mb4”) AS homepage,convert(user.joindate USING “utf8mb4”) AS joindate,convert(user.aim USING “utf8mb4”) AS aim,convert(user.yahoo USING “utf8mb4”) AS yahoo,convert(user.icq USING “utf8mb4”) AS icq,convert(user.msn USING “utf8mb4”) AS msn,convert(user.skype USING “utf8mb4”) AS skype FROM user AS user LIMIT 0, 100
I’ve been trying the vBulletin importer rather than vBulletin3 having seen this advised elsewhere on this forum. Can anyone provide me with a solution/work around to prevent this issue?
Thanks for the help!
Ollie
Hello there!
We are in the proccess of migrating from a vbulletin v 4.2.3 forum to wordpress and bbpress
BUT importing results in completely unreadable characters!
For instance take a look here –> http://www.ninty.gr/home/forums/
The text is like :
“ΚαταÏχάς, μην είστ”
The originating vbulletin forum is in Greek (http://www.ninty.gr/content.php) if it means anything btw
Amy ideas?
Well I am VERY HAPPY to say that I am now successfully importing from vBulletin 3.8.4 to our new WordPress site. I can already browse through the topics and some posts, users, etc. Looks great. I just had one question:
The import is still occuring, and I know with 1.8 million posts it will take while. It already converted users and topics. Now it is creating a series of dashed lines. ———————-
Is this the posts themselves converting? Just curious how long this might take until finished. Just a rough estimate would be great. Thanks!
Ok, so if i can find someone to do the work and get the urls fixed then submit the code into trac it might get integrated into the core by someone in the future?
I understand about the money thing also. I am just trying to think of a way to kickstart the development on the platform again as its on its way to being a really good forum software. it has almost all of the basics covered and some great plugins too. its just those few bits that mean it cant be used by some people. I would love to see bbpress be the defacto choice over phpbb or vbulletin and thought if i could sponsor the development then perhaps it might encourage a valuable dev to get more involved?
There are no themes or plugins that I know of that support _bbp_old_user_id, bbPress offers that and exposes it for developers to use as they will.
I pretty much cannot see any use case where displaying the old vBulletin user ID would be required, it really would only be needed to map previous vBulletin extensions and plugins to bbPress after migration.
Thank you for the tips provided, Stephen! However, isn’t there any user-friendly plugin for this? I am a total MySQL noob. We are currently choosing from responsive WP themes at http://www.templatemonster.com/wordpress-themes.php for our Alumni Association website redesign, but we already have an existing board based on vBulletin, so smooth migration seems to be very challenging.
Can try the other one, i.e. vBulletin please? Theres a possibility I’ve messed things up here 🙁
Thanks Stephen. I am choosing vBulletin3
Be careful when you post code here on the forums, next time you’ll want to make sure you do not post passwords 😉 (I’ve removed them)
If your using the 2.6 alpha (you should) are you selecting vBulletin or vBulletin3 from the dropdown?
