[Chad]

Hi folks. Saw this page, https://codex.bbpress.org/import-forums/vbulletin/

It hasn’t been updated in 2 years. Just wondering if there are any improvements made to this tool?

Some of my concerns are these listed:

1. Custom vBulletin BBCodes are not supported eg. [youtube] – You will have to manually change these yourself either before importing in vBulletin or after importing into bbPress using phpMyAdmin.

2. All ‘Ordered Lists’

will be displayed as numerical lists.

3. You may find extra page breaks <br> and paragraph <p> elements in topics and replies and is less than ideal and is from the way the BBCodes are converted during the forum import conversion. You will find these primarily around ‘blockquotes’ and ‘lists’

In regards to

#1 If I create the exact bbocodes in BBPress prior to the import, I assume this would rectify this area correct?

#2 This is definitely not good. I’m hoping someone knows a trick around this.
#3 Same as above.

[Stephen Edgar]

This can be quite complex and is really not a “bbPress”, it is more a Apache/Nginx “thing”, take a look at the following on Stack Overflow, it describes the changes needed to redirect via .htaccess an old vBulletin to bbPress site:
http://stackoverflow.com/q/13920322/1911294

[londonhutch]

Hi,

First time here so please be gentle.

I run a moderately popular vBulletin 4.1 site with 11,000+ users, 13,900+ threads and 39,000 posts. The users very rarely use any of the “power” features of vBulletin and I want to fully integrate the board into WordPress.

My preference would be to transfer using the script from vBulletin to bbPress, or alternatively to use a site like cms2cms. My main concern is what will happen to my Google search rankings. At the moment the site is very well spidered by Google and we are the no.1 search result for a number of very important key words, phrases.

Is there any way I can redirect all the posts, threads etc to the new bbPress so that my ranking would not be seriously affected? I am not that technically minded when it comes to robot files etc, so any help would be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[gipsypainter]

Hi

I just finished an import of a former VBulletin install, including 10 forums and over 183000 replies. It took a long while but finally succeeded.

The problem is that the users imported but not associated with the correct topics and replies. In other words they are all out of sync…the wrong user with the wrong replies.

Is there a way to fix this? I have run all the repair features. But still it is not correct.

Thanks for any help.

Wordpress 4.0
BBpress Version 2.5.4
imported from VBulletin 4

Chris

[Hector]

@robin-w LOL X’D

had understood that was to assign the image by code, almost like vbulletin, apology hahah works perfect the code

sorry… 😀

[nwcountry]

I’m sorry I didn’t have notify checked evidently. I didn’t know you had answered Robin. Thank you so much! I did post another question today about this, but also, about uploading a ready-made vbulletin template.

Has anyone tried that successfully? That you know of? Thank you again;) denise

[nwcountry]

this example?

http://www.seniorforums

It doesn’t need to be full-screen though. I just want a simple forum, although I do want to be able to have some color, and some control. I have a host, and have downloaded WordPress (to Hostgator) and now I have added the plugin for bbpress. I am just a bit leary of what I am going to “get”. I would love to just install a vbulletin template, but looks like folks are having trouble uploading forum templates from other sites etc.

Thanks in advance for any help;) denise

PS I don’t plan on any other content, and don’t plan this as a business, just a site for seniors so they can visit and have a place to go online:)

[peter-hamilton]

I have read a few of the previous posts and saw lots of interesting topics come by.

First I have to make a statement and a thank you.

Statement: BBPress is exactly what I need in a forum, yes I think it is forum software and forum software only.

Also it is a wordpress plugin, not a standalone CMS so I can not expect it to have all functions I wish for, but then there are plugins for most of them.

As a non-professional developer I had my share of problems after the first install, and coming from phpBB (only for 5 months there) I missed a lot of funtions mentioned in earlier posts that come standard in stand-alone forum CMS like IPBoard and VBulletin.

Those two (IPB VBull) have been my inspiration and I wanted a forum with similar functions, after trying phpBB for a few months, which I really enjoyed as a learning curve, I decided to give wordpress/bbpress/buddypress a try.

I have now been experimenting and learning the wordpress syntax for about 1 year, and have only one thing to say:

BBPress is the better forum software for me.

I can now make a perfect profile page.

I can have forums with the right hierarchy.

I can have all the extras that make other forum CMS cool thanks to some lightweight plugins, even attachments/images in posts can be made to look better then many other forums I visit.

Of course all is not perfect, I am not alone in hoping to see better image management, private albums, better TinyMCE editor, moderator functions/pages and the all important “like” function, but all in all BBP is just as functional as many high profile forums.

being a wordpress plugin makes BBPress modular, user friendly enough and highly functional not to forget absolutely FREE, besides a few hundered hours of brain pain.

Anyway, back to my theme (BBFacelook) development.
Peter Hamilton

[Peggy]

Thank you for your help!

I did leave the table prefix blank when I tried importing the old forum database. And I tried vBulletin3 and vbulletin but still nothing worked.

I don’t know if I can add this but here is a screenshot:

Also here is a link to the old forum if this helps:

Do you see anything I could be doing wrong?

Thanks again for your help!
Peggy

Thanks,
Peggy

[Stephen Edgar]

Based on the names of the table names you mention just leave the table prefix blank.

Did you select vBulletin3 from the dropdown?

[Peggy]

Hello,

I’m having a problem importing a vbulletin forum into bbpress. It keeps telling “no forums to convert”, “no comments to convert” for every item “no ….. to convert”. I didn’t create the old site I am taking this from but when I got to page source, I see vBulletin 3.8.2 so I’m guessing that’s the version it is.

Also the database doesn’t show any table prefixes, it just has “access” as the first one, “adminhelp” as the second and so on.

The site is http://troianiwebdesign.com/gulfstar – wordpress version 3.9.2 – bbpress version 2.5.4

Please help me figure out the problem so I can get this moved over!

Thank you!

[Peggy]

I’m having a problem importing a vbulletin forum into bbpress. It keeps telling “no forums to convert”, “no comments to convert” for every item “no ….. to convert”. I didn’t create the old site I am taking this from but when I got to page source, I see vBulletin 3.8.2 so I’m guessing that’s the version it is.

Also the database doesn’t show any table prefixes, it just has “access” as the first one, “adminhelp” as the second and so on.

The site is http://troianiwebdesign.com/gulfstar if you need that.

Please help me figure out the problem so I can get this moved over!

Thank you!

[trevan]

Had to run the import 15 or 20 times, restoring the database each time (because the options on the reset forums page didn’t see to work for me). Each time, the conversion hung, and at a different spot every time.

I tried adjusting “rows to process at a time” to 50, and “second(s) delay between each group of rows” – to no avail.

Finally, I decided to import all of the users (~3700) first, and then do a second conversion of everything else – omitting the users.

That finally allowed the conversions to take place and finish “successfully”.

The problem I’m seeing now, is that the posts don’t line up with the correct user.

Anybody have an idea on how to fix this? Do I need to do it all again, or is there some magic wand I can wave, or script I can run to pair the correct users to their posts/replies?

[themefurnace]

To add – Ive just installed APC and enabled object cache which has made my Vbulletin forum even quicker but hasn’t helped bbPress. Browsing is slow and posting new threads / replies even slower.

Have optimized the DB with phpMyadmin also.

[themefurnace]

Hi,

I have finally converted a large forum over to bbPress from Vbulletin,
The bbPress forum page and threads etc are quite slow – Im just using bbPress + BuddyPress with Twenty Twelve theme at the moment while I code my forum theme.

The bbPress section of the site is slow – there is a few seconds delay when clicking a thread or onto the forum page itself so guessing this is due to the size – 850k replies, 61k topics and 21k users.

I wondered if there were any tweaks or recommendations for speeding up the site, Im on my own dedicated server and Vbulletin is blazing fast on it.

I saw this thread – http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/slow-to-post-forum-topics-and-replies-on-large-forum/ where it mentioned a speed increase in 2.6 for larger forums, any news on that ? Or anything I can try now to test it out ?

I read that hidden forums might make a difference so I unhid the forum but no speed increase.

[Stephen Edgar]

There are two files attached here, vBulletin5.php and converter.php:
https://gist.github.com/ntwb/02aff28553ae63e6a614
You can also download both in a zip file via this link.

You need to place vBulletin5.php in the folder `/includes/admin/converters/
and converter.php in the folder /includes/admin/

A couple of notes, you’ll need to make sure your vB5 tables do NOT include a table prefix, if they do this will not work and you will need to rename all of your tables to remove the prefix.

You can confirm this by opening your vB5 database in phpMyAdmin
<img src=”https://i.cloudup.com/czW3RJAK-9.png&#8221; alt=”” />
If your node table name is the same as mine in the above screenshot your good to go, if it is a prefix it it would look similar to prefix_node (the prefix could be named anything)

One other important note, the main difference with this version of the importer is to support vBulletin 5 ‘comments’ which are like bbPress threaded replies, allowing users to reply to replies, these vBulletin replies will NOT work as expected unless you have enabled bbPress threaded replies setting before you import your forums. Also if you reset and delete your forums or uninstall the bbPress plugin this setting will be reset and you need to enable it again.

P.s. More my bad, I appeared to not hit submit on this post when I uploaded these yesterday 😉

Let me know how it goes 🙂

[pfswss]

Jimi, I was also disappointed when I installed BBPress and found it to be very unlike a forum I had known in the past. Out of the box it is too simplistic with several themes I tried it with. I just wanted a forum look but this does not seem possible unless you hire developers or are a really good coder with loads of time.

I do appreciate the effort of the developers as an open source software. unfortunately I had the wrong impression from reading reviews of several wordpress solutions as they all pointed to this one as the best. To be blunt I would not like to try the worst ones.

I have had a lot of issues, many plugins are not compatible and I still have nothing that looks remotely like a normal forum. I actually just searched to how to enable PM’s and that is when I found this post and another which says basically you need to install the Buddypress which is an overkill it seems.

I do hope that BBPress will eventually cater to everyone’s needs but sadly I think I have to look at another solution and revert back to my PHPBB forum form 2 weeks ago. Then I will consider going with IP board or Vbulletin.

Jimi, can you tell me why you stopped using IPB?

[Stephen Edgar]

I have a customised version of the importer for vBulletin 5.

There are a couple of tweaks that are needed though to bring it in-line with the current importer updates. The issue is with the way our current import script is setup we need to heavily tweak not just the import script but also our main converter.php file to handle the complex SQL joins need.

If your familiar with SVN you can checkout the 2440-converter.php.2.diff​ patch in the following ticket along with vBulletin5.php, if not let me know and I’ll upload full files of these somewhere.

https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2440

[Peyman Moghaddam]

Hi All,

I can see that there is both a vBulletin and a vBulletin 3 option to import a forum. Do I simply select ‘vBulletin’ in order to import a VB5 forum, or am I stuck?

Many thanks in advance.

Kind Regards,

[gogitossj34]

So, my forum is at http://mmo4teen.com/forums/
and I wan it to look similar to a vbulletin forum, table like, especially the inside post and topic. Like avatar and info on the left with post on the right ( currently, it’s one on top of another ).
I tried a lot of css but it did’t work very well.
Anyone have some experience with this >

[themefurnace]

Hello,

I wondered if anyone had any advice for importing larger forums,
I run the importer and get 140k topics imported, replies are hanging around the 12k mark ( there are 800K posts on the original forum).

Ive changed php.ini max execution times etc so I no longer get errors there.
Ive tried this on my server and also locally with no joy.

[Stephen Edgar]

bbPress includes two vBulletin importers, one is vBulletin3 for vBulettin 3.x and the other vBulletin is for the 4.x versions.

Did you try the both or only the 3.x version?

[Jimi Wikman]

@netweb I appreciate the long list of answers and I like what you post 🙂

For the warning system you can see it in action on IPB and it’s basically a system that allow for moderators to issue a warning for bad behavior. This can be accompanied by a temporary ban, forced into moderation or an outright permanent ban.

User warning system allows custom sanctions

When troublesome users make themselves a nuicance, IP.Board provides a range of tools to help staff deal with the situation. The user warning system enables sanctions to be issued, ranging from a simple message sent to the user, right up to an outright permanent ban. Other options include a temporary suspension, or putting the user in the moderation queue, requiring all of their topics & posts to be approved by staff before they’re shown.

—

Is it really so difficult to make it so BBPress create pages for all areas of the forum? Rather than using a template each area have its own page and can take advantage of all the features of a page? That way it would never be a problem to setup pages to be full width, what sidebars to add on the forum index or inside a forum, or even a thread?

I am not familiar with the code, but if such a thing could be done, then that problem would no longer exist?

—
Custom fields should not be something you ask the users to go inet functions.php to fix, that is way to complicated for the majority of the users 🙂

—

Post and topic indicators, have you talked to other forum developers like IPB and VBulletin about how they have solved this? I mean IPB have forums with tens of million topics and tens of thousands of users that are all working well even with this turned on?

[Jimi Wikman]

It’s the same issue with all forum software, and blogging software for that matter.

In my experience most people do not want a minimalistic forum and that is why you will find thousands upon thousands of people asking which forum can integrate with WordPress. Check any forum and you will find hundreds of people looking for ways to integrate that forum software into their wordpress.

The ones that use BBPress are the ones that are content with what comes out of the box and I would say we are a very large minority!

With the decline in forum usage in the last 5-10 years I would say that functionality is what makes forums stay alive. If you look at IPB and VBulletin they are still the most used forum software despite the fact that they cost money.

The reason for that is the features that can satisfy every need a user could possibly have. Its constantly being developed and has many large modifications from a core group of dedicated developers.

I think that with some modifications to the core so that the basic functionality can easily be added, perhaps by adding a plugin storage with key plugins that can be added or removed as the user need it. I don’t think regular users will spend time looking for a BBPress plugin to give new post indicators and go through the hassle of installing Buddypress for more functionality. Instead I believe in the setup that Buddypress have with core modules you can turn on or off as you need them.

I DO believe that BBPress have a great potential to be one of the largest and most used forum software in the world. It has a great integration with WordPress. It has lots of features and a strong community of plugin developers. And it’s very fast.

I just think it need a lower learning curve and a more approachable attitude 🙂

[muskratt]

I’m running WP 3.9.1 and the latest copy of the plugin on a very vanilla site with not much on it yet.

phpBB 3.0.12, Tap-a-talk is the only mod it’s running
Database size: 20MB, about 6000 posts total

I’ve tried this twice using the remote server (after adding the WP server’s IP to the allowed remote MySQL connections) as well as on the same local server doing a sqldump from the remote into the local box. Both times, I get the scrolling of text showing nothing to import/convert and it finishes without error (aside from the fact nothing is imported).

This forum was originally vBulletin 3.x and it was converted to phpBB about a year ago but I don’t believe this should have much to do with it since there is no other modification/customization running except Tap-a-talk.

Where to go from here?