Hi there,

I have a large vBulletin forum (15,000 members / 20,000 topics / 3.5m posts) and I’m hoping to move it to bbPress.

As you might expect, the conversion is proving to be a lengthy process, and I’m hoping to keep disruption and downtime for users to a minimum.

Would the following work?

Close vBulletin forum
Export database
Re-open vBulletin but close registration
Convert to bbPress local installation (which’ll take a few days)
Once conversion’s taken place, quickly export only the new vBulletin topics and posts from the last few days, then import them to bbPress

I suppose my question is whether this is something the bbPress importer will be able to make sense of: if I try to import a database that only consists of new topics and replies, plus replies to topics it’s already imported, will everything work as hoped, and will those posts be mapped to the correct users?

Thanks in advance!

[@compactabt Participant 9 years, 10 months ago]

(At risk of this thread going off topic I should add that if, at this point, anybody’s thinking “if he’s hoping to use bbPress for that big a forum I hope he’s considered the problems he’ll have with [BLANK]”, please do jump in!)

[@robin-w Moderator 9 years, 10 months ago]

see https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbbpress-performance/

bbPress for Millions of posts?

[@peterdadams Participant 9 years, 4 months ago]

Hi

This is an interesting thread.

I have a large vBulletin 5.1.7 forum and after reading this topic I am thinking about migrating to bbPress.

I have powerful dedicated server solely for the forum, the forum has topics: 129,286 Posts: 3,055,650 Members: 51,108

Is there a script to import my forum into bbPress?

Can the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache be used with bbPress to boost perform dance?

Many thanks for your help.

[@peterdadams Participant 9 years, 4 months ago]

I forgot to mention does bbPress support multiple languages?

[@robkk Moderator 9 years, 4 months ago]

@peterdadams

There should be a vBull importer in bbPress.

The W3 Total Cache would help optimize bbPress. Of course it is more important to have high performance hardware on your site, use an opcode cache, possibly an object cache (the plugin helps add a backend file), and keeping your database tidy. Page cache can become a little tricky in some situations but it should be fine using w3 total cache with bbPres.

bbPress is translatable and there are translations for specific langauges.

bbPress could work in multilingual sites. It might be better to just allow your users to contribute their content in their language though. There is an issue using WPML though.

[@compactabt Participant 9 years, 4 months ago]

Peter – I appreciate this may not be of much use but in the end I decided to go with Xenforo, which felt like a more robust and fully-featured forum. Of all the forum software I tried, the import process was by far the quickest – it converted the posts direct from my old server (so I didn’t need to download then upload any databases) and did the whole thing in about three hours. Considering other forum software was looking like it’d take days (or just timed out or went wrong), I was really happy with this.