[MorpheusWP]

I’m having a bit of trouble with the phpBB importer in bbPress 2.5.4.

I’ve been through about 15 imports in a cloned staging area with varying results.

My phpBB forum contains 260,000 posts, 20,000 topics and about 13,000 users. The forum has been “cleaned up” in phpBB first meaning that I’ve used phpBB’s tools to resync the forums

On each import, it works ok to a point where it successfully importing the users, forum structure and the topics. Once it begins importing and converting to replies, it gets to about 158,000 and hangs.

Clicking Stop and allowing a few minutes of rest and start again does work but the converter slows to a crawl, sometimes to 1/50th of the original speed.

Another issue is that many thousands of the replies seem to be mismatched and they’re not in their correct forums.

Usually bbPress’s repair tools fail to correct the mismatch.

Does anyone here have any guidance for me?

[MorpheusWP]

Update: conversion speed varies a lot during my latest import.

For example, the rate was 700 replies converted in 1 hour. Later in the day, the peak conversion rate hit about 20,000 replies in 1 hour.

I’m nearly there now, about 80% of replies have been converted.

Next begins the repair process to try and find parent forums for all the orphaned replies.

[MorpheusWP]

Update: import successful.
On the Repair forum tools page, all repairs work fine except for the following two which eventually throw up a 500 HTTP error. Hopefully this won’t cause trouble for me later.

These repairs timeout:
– Recalculate the position of each reply
– Remap existing users to default forum roles

A quick look through all the forums and topics and everything looks normal.

Hats off to the contributors who have developed the forum import tool, delighted that I finally got my forums migrated successfully!

Suggestions for minor UI improvements for the forum import tool:
– an option to have an audible beep or similar each time a block is successfully converted. It means we can leave running in the background and know immediately when it gets stuck and needs a manual stop/start. I had to manually stop / start about 5 or 6 times during the conversion process.

– a percentage of completeness and estimated time of completion (based on current conversion rate) would be a nice addition