[Josh Leuze]

I know it’s a long shot, but has anyone out there had the misfortune of dealing with YAF before?

Recently I volunteered to move and fix an install of YetAnotherForum.NET, and after looking under the hood, I’d really like to scrap YAF and move it to just about any other forum software, especially a platform that could be migrated to bbPress.

Any mad scientists with wild ideas?

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Mad idea.

Convert it to phpBB2 (NOT 3!) – http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/default.aspx?g=posts&t=782

Convert phpBB to bbPress – http://www.iteisa.com/phpbb2bbpress/

See also: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/import-smf-to-bbpress

If you read the SMF to bbPress thread you’ll see what machinations were needed. Good luck!

[Josh Leuze]

Thanks so much for the links Ipstenu!

I figured if there was a way out of YAF, it would most likely be to phpBB. Surprised I didn’t find this in my own searches.

If I can just get this data out of YAF, I think it will all be downhill from there

[Josh Leuze]

Bummer, I took a closer look at the YAF forum thread, and it’s actually to convert from phpBB to YetAnotherForum…

Anyone else have any other wild ideas?

[sbricchiLIN]

Hi Jleuze…

Did you get some solution for your problem?

If you did I would really appreciate if you could share your experience since I’m at the same situation now.

Thank you.

[Adam Harley (Kawauso)]

At first I was like “open”, then I was all “ASP.NET”

So yeah, uhh, anyone got a dump of a database for one of these? I don’t even have a test install I can run ASP.NET that I know of…

Edit: Nevermind, Apache can do it. Will look into a conversion script, but it’ll be written in PHP.

[Adam Harley (Kawauso)]

Argh, ASP.NET is an evil possessed devil of a language… anyone got a database dump I can test with?

[Josh Leuze]

Hi sbricchiLIN, I did come up with a solution to migrate a forum from YAF to bbPress.

But I had to do a 3 step migration to do it: YetAnotherForum to vBulletin to phpBB to bbPress.

It’s a tedious process, and not perfect, but I got the forums converted!

Basically, in all my research the only converter for YetAnotherForum.NET that I could find it vBulletin. So that’s the first step. unfortunately it is commercial, and closed source, but a $100 is much cheaper than paying someone to convert it for you!

vBulletin has a tool called ImpEx that can import a YAF forum into vBulletin. But it is tricky since YAF uses MSSQL, and you want to convert to MySQL on vBulletin. I did all this on my local machine running Windows, with a MSSQL server to run the YAF database and WAMP to run vBulletin.

I did not have YAF installed locally and running, just the database. You probably want to get your YAF forums running on a local Windows machine as a first step. The YAF to vBulletin importer is old and totally unsupported, so it is crude, but better than nothing. I was only able to import about 80% of my forum content, and I lost a user account. But one user out of 600 seemed a small price to pay.

I think the loses were due to funky characters and long titles, so if you have a local install of YAF, you can fix those things before you import.

After you get the data into vBulletin, it is a much smoother process. There is of course a lot of converters for phpBB, and converting from phpBB to bbPress is pretty easy.

In the end, the migration went ok, I had some issues with the HTML code in the posts, had to convert some characters in the database, and install some plugins so that the HTML content in the old posts would work in bbPress. But it was all worth it to get away from YAF, the forum members all seem to be happy with the new forum, no complaints, just a few feature requests.

I have really been meaning to do several blog posts explaining how to do all this cause it’s one hell of a project, but who ever has the time to do everything they want to?

If anyone else takes the plunge and tries to migrate from YAF to bbPress and has any specific questions, let me know and I’d be happy to try and give a hand!

[sbricchiLIN]

Jleuze,

It’s great news for me what you explain here.

Now my idea is just to stop at the first step. I’ll try migrating to vBulletin and stay there. I think it will be the best…

Thank you for sharing your experience.