Hi there,

I used the import tool to suck all the users, forums, and topics from a phpbb forum database. It seems to import fine. In the admin area, I am able to see all the forums and all the topics. However, when I look at the front end, I just see the entire list of forums that were imported in, but they show as 0 topics or 0 replies. Also, all users appear as “Anonymous” and there aren’t any users added in the user management area :/

Any ideas why this may be?

Thank you much!

[@nprimex1 Participant 11 years, 11 months ago]

okay, sorry! After mucking around, REPAIRING the counts worked!

Now, I just need to figure out this users issue…

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 11 months ago]

Make sure you check the option ‘Import Users’

[@nprimex1 Participant 11 years, 11 months ago]

Thanks Stephan – I’m an idiot! That worked.

However, I’m noticing not all replies are matching up with their parent topic. Is this a known issue? User passwords are blank in the database too so they can’t log in… any help would be much appreciated!

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 11 months ago]

There are a couple of minor updates for the importer with bbPress 2.3 but these do not relate to mismatched topics and replies. How many are we talking? 1 or 2? 10 or 20? 5,000? What percentage?

Don’t worry about user passwords, they are stored in usermeta until the user logs in for the first time.

[@nprimex1 Participant 11 years, 11 months ago]

Stephan, I ended up with a fresh install again and did the import from scratch. This time, it looks like it worked!

Has there been any resources for cleaning up bbcode? it looks like a bunch of random characters are in place around the brackets where bbcode once was.

Also, I am using sitewide forums over the buddypress forums. However, I wanted to migrate topics from one of the imported forums into the group forum that was created … however, I see no option to mass move topics? I did some searching and found a reference to it if I were to “delete” a forum, however trashing it, simply just puts it in the trash bin! Can you please shed some light onthis?

Thank you so much for your continued support! I’ve been a hardcore phpbb user for a long time but the painful customization of it finally turned me!

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 11 months ago]

Excellent, the BBCode cleanup bits are the main changes that will ship with bbPress 2.3, I think I have most of them sorted now.

Moving topics is a manual task at the moment, it is planned for a future release. (#1838 & #1721)

Are you able to configure your old phpBB forums (or a copy of them) and set these forums the way you want them to exist in bbPress and then do the import?
(Essentially use the phpBB mod tools to get the setup you want before importing into bbPress)

[@nprimex1 Participant 11 years, 11 months ago]

Hi Stephan, that’s great to hear! Any idea when you plan to release? I’m just doing demo runs right now; I’ll be officially moving my phpbb3-based community over to this bbpress install next month.

I have already been doing a lot of user pruning and forum configuration on the live phpbb forum to make it as close to what I want the bbpress to look like.

I guess I will need to figure out how to mass move topics from a regular forum into a group designated forum. I tried mucking with the database by changing the “post_parent” field to match up with the new group forum, however it didn’t work… the front end looked a little wonky. Tips?

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 11 months ago]

You can grab the 2.3 beta 1 now, see https://bbpress.org/blog/2013/01/bbpress-2-3-beta-1/

In theory changing `post_parent` should do the trick though you need to run the ‘Repair Tools’ after doing this to recount all the things.

[@nprimex1 Participant 11 years, 11 months ago]

I am going to grab the beta and give it a shot then! I’ll report back with the results .. it’s about 40k posts and 2k users.

I’ll try changing post_parent in the database and running the repair tools, too.

Thank you, Stephen!

[@nprimex1 Participant 11 years, 10 months ago]

Hi Stephen,

Looks like the conversion hangs around 13,000 replies …. I have about 20,000 more to go. It definitely slows down near the end.

However, the posts that do end up getting converted look beautiful.

My only guess is the scrubbing process is taking a lot more resources than before this beta version? Any insights would be much appreciated 🙂

Also, I’ve noticed that there seems to be only two levels of hiearchy that gets converted … Categories and 1 level of forums below that. Nested forums within forums in phpbb don’t get pulled in? It’s okay for me either way because i’ll modify my forum structure before importing them.

nadir

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 10 months ago]

Looks like the conversion hangs around 13,000 replies …. I have about 20,000 more to go. It definitely slows down near the end.

If it hangs and appears that nothing is progressing, click ‘stop’, wait a minute to give your webhost a moment to finish anything it might be doing, click ‘start’ and it should resume from where it left off. Take note of the step and count of where it was up to so after importing you can check that for example all replies between 13,400 & 13,499 have indeed been imported.

However, the posts that do end up getting converted look beautiful.

Cool, took a while to get to this point but quite satisfied with the results.

My only guess is the scrubbing process is taking a lot more resources than before this beta version? Any insights would be much appreciated

There have been no changes to the actual converter, only the importer. Granted that the import now imports more phpBB fields than it did previously but this should make only a small increase to the SQL query performance.

As each topic or reply is imported it is parsed with ~30 regex strings to convert the BBCodes, I haven’t done any benchmarks but presumably this has some impact.

My base phpBB database import I have used for the past 6 months to test with is around ~6000 topics and 30,000 replies and I haven’t really noticed much of an impact during what I would say has been ~100 imports.

Also, I’ve noticed that there seems to be only two levels of hiearchy that gets converted … Categories and 1 level of forums below that. Nested forums within forums in phpbb don’t get pulled in? It’s okay for me either way because i’ll modify my forum structure before importing them.

That should work fine, I tested things to a depth of 4 with a forums hierarchy based on the ‘‘nested set model’.

[@nprimex1 Participant 11 years, 10 months ago]

Very cool – I appreciate the continued help and support, Stephen.

I’m glad to hear I can simply hit stop and start when I want to resume – awesome UX there. I’ll give the import another go.