I am currently doing a preliminary test import of a massive forum with 25 forums, 10K + Users, 70K + Topics and 1 Million + Replies from an ASP Playground Forum. I have successfully migrated from MS SQL to MySQL and converted the database structure into a working, mappable structure. I have started and stopped the import multiple times as I worked out the kinks in my custom ASP converter. At this point I have a few questions that I could use some help in answering.

1) There is one hashed user password field with no salt. I can’t seem to find good documentation on how the password process works. I have noticed in the bbPress1 and other converters that do not have salts that the callback_password and authenticate_password functions both just ‘return false’. What does this mean once the users are trying to login? How should I map the fields correctly and do I need an authenticate_password function?

2) With over a million replies, the import process takes a very long time (going on weeks now). When we proceed with a live conversion, we very much need to keep the forum’s downtime under a week and preferably we would keep it under 4 days. Does anyone have any tips for speeding up the conversion process?

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 4 months ago]

Nice…

2) The best way to speed up the conversion is to run it locally rather than on your remote host. For some of the bigger sites I have converted I setup a local install which allowed me to tweak some RAM settings and use local fast hard disks which helped a great deal. One of the larger conversions I actually setup a 4GB RAM drive for all the MySQL data and that really made things hum along quickly. Once it was complete I dumped the MySQL database to a file and FTP’d it back up to the remote host and imported it ‘ready to go’ so to speak.

1) As for importing passwords I will get back to you on, I have three new importers (Drupal, MyBB & PunBB) that I need to get this sorted out for and I will be looking into ‘getting this right’ over the next couple of days. The bbPress1 passwords were easy as they are already an actual WordPress password so they are basically just copied from bbPress -> WordPress.