Hi

I have fresh installation of WordPress and bbPress. I have old 2.x SMF forum I would like to move across. While using “Import Forums”, when I use correct server name, user name, password and prefix “smf_” (all from smf settings.php) I am getting error message:

Repair any missing information: Continue
WordPress database error: [Unknown character set: ‘utf8mb4’]
SELECT convert(members.id_member USING “utf8mb4”) AS id_member,convert(members.passwd USING “utf8mb4”) AS passwd,convert(members.member_name USING “utf8mb4”) AS member_name,convert(members.email_address USING “utf8mb4”) AS email_address,convert(members.website_url USING “utf8mb4”) AS website_url,convert(members.date_registered USING “utf8mb4”) AS date_registered,convert(members.real_name USING “utf8mb4”) AS real_name,convert(members.aim USING “utf8mb4”) AS aim,convert(members.yim USING “utf8mb4”) AS yim,convert(members.icq USING “utf8mb4”) AS icq,convert(members.msn USING “utf8mb4”) AS msn,convert(members.signature USING “utf8mb4”) AS signature,convert(members.avatar USING “utf8mb4”) AS avatar,convert(members.location USING “utf8mb4”) AS location,convert(members.personal_text USING “utf8mb4”) AS personal_text FROM members AS members LIMIT 0, 100
No users to convertNo data to cleanStarting Conversion

Nothing seems to be working. I tried with and without any prefix, i tried converting users and not. I start FRESH every time. SMF database is NOT in utf8mb4. If i go to php admin i see Type: MyISAM and Collation: utf8_general_ci for every table.

Could you help?
THanks

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years, 1 month ago]

Any ideas? Am I the only one moving smf to bbpress?

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years, 1 month ago]

Nobody knows what could be the problem here?

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years ago]

bump or it will be lost 🙁

[@netweb Keymaster 8 years ago]

A couple of things, if you use bbPress 2.6-alpha that should fix your issues, you can download it from https://bbpress.org/download

You “might” need to update your old SMF database to the latest version, its too difficult to maintain multiple database versions for ~25 or so forum imports we support.

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years ago]

Thank you for the reply. I have downloaded and installed alpha.
When running import im getting error:

Repair any missing information: Continue
WordPress database error: [Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes]
CREATE TABLE wp_bbp_converter_translator ( meta_id mediumint(8) unsigned not null auto_increment, value_type varchar(25) null, value_id bigint(20) unsigned not null default ‘0’, meta_key varchar(255) null, meta_value varchar(255) null, PRIMARY KEY (meta_id), KEY value_id (value_id), KEY meta_join (meta_key, meta_value) ) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci

I tried to find this error and potential solution. I found someone recommending bbpress toolkit. I have installed it and system info is as follow:

WP version 4.6.1
Theme Twenty Sixteen 1.3
PHP version 5.4.19
bbPress version 2.6-alpha-6091
Active Plugins Name and Version
– p1 bbP Toolkit 1.0.6
– p2 bbPress 2.6-alpha

Any idea ?

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 8 years ago]

Hey @mikehaceman, sorry you are having trouble.

This isn’t usually necessary, but something between your two installations isn’t cooperating, and in these rare cases it unfortunately requires a bit of scrutiny.

WordPress installations since 4.4 and beyond will try to use utf8mb4 for their character set, and utf8mb4_unicode_ci for their collation. Traditionally these are InnoDB tables, but you’re usually free to decide this for yourself.

utf8mb4 tables have reduced maximum key lengths due to the additional bytes required for each character, so the safe maximum length is reduced to 191. It’s possible we haven’t updated our special converter table to handle this, so I’ll check, and update it if that’s the case.

If you wanted, it may be worth going through all databases, all tables, and all columns, and ensure that your encoding & collations are what you expect them to be. (This means in your old forums, and your new ones.)

[Edit: Updated this post to reflect what we’ve updated in bbPress’s converter]

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 8 years ago]

@mikehaceman – that was it.

See: https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3026

Can you try what Netweb suggested again, and see if it works now?

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years ago]

Hi @johnjamesjacoby

Thanks for the update. I have downloaded again the alpha and installed it fresh on my website. Unfortunately still the same error message:

Repair any missing information: Continue
WordPress database error: [Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes]
CREATE TABLE wp_bbp_converter_translator ( meta_id mediumint(8) unsigned not null auto_increment, value_type varchar(25) null, value_id bigint(20) unsigned not null default ‘0’, meta_key varchar(255) null, meta_value varchar(255) null, PRIMARY KEY (meta_id), KEY value_id (value_id), KEY meta_join (meta_key, meta_value) ) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci
No data to cleanStarting Conversion

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years ago]

I followed the patch instruction and updated the file manually. The conversion did kicked off and the wheel is spinning for an hour now.

Fingers crossed, because it is doing something!!

Hopefully it will not crash, Ill leave it for some time. Will update as soon as possible.

Thanks

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years ago]

Ok it was hanging for too long so here what i found out:

on the patch page (https://bbpress.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/3026/3026.patch) you made few mistakes:

1. Line 663 KEY meta_join (meta_key, meta_value) ) {$charset_collate};”;
should finish with ” , ” not ” ;”; ” otherwise it will crash error

2. Line 660 PRIMARY KEY (meta_id),
is duplicated so i guess 660 or 661 can be removed

3. when running import after those changes in wordpress, converter is giving error message:

WordPress database error: [Key column ‘meta_id’ doesn’t exist in table]
CREATE TABLE wp_bbp_converter_translator ( value_id bigint(20) unsigned not null default ‘0’, meta_key varchar(255) null, meta_value varchar(255) null, PRIMARY KEY (meta_id), KEY value_id (value_id), KEY meta_join (meta_key, meta_value) ) DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Btw… im not a coder. No clue about php im just applying some logic to what i see 😉

[@netweb Keymaster 8 years ago]

@mikehaceman, thanks for testing this, I’ll update the and test the patch in a few hours

And FWIW an import should also work albeit slower without the wp_bbp_converter_translator table, some hosts don’t allow users to create new tables, so I’ll see if I can figure out why this isn’t working either for you 🙂

[@timsilva_ Participant 8 years ago]

I dealt with some of these issues about a year ago. I was migrating from SMF 2* to bbPress and I had tons of issues with formatting in posts and missing data. I ended up hiring Michael Z Noble (http://wwww.michaelznoble.com/ – The 4 w’s is intentional 😉 ) to write a custom migration script to help me through all of these issues (as well as transfer a bunch of data like signatures, up/down votes, thread view counts, avatars, etc, into various bbPress/BuddyPress plugins/functions). The utf8mb4/utf8mb4_unicode_ci/character set issues were particularly tough for me to get through. I ended up switching to a new host that had a newer version of MySQL in order to successfully complete the migration. In short, if you aren’t a senior dev, hire a dev. 😉

Best of luck my friend! 🙂

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years ago]

Thanks for the advice @timsilva_ Unfortunately im not generating any income from my forum so spending tons of money just to move it from smf to bb is not the best solution in my case 🙁

@netweb
error is [Key column ‘meta_id’ doesn’t exist in table] – im not sure this error is specific to my website only. Im guessing here of course, but it sounds like meta_id has not been created by bb converter but it needs it during conversion process…

[@mikehaceman Participant 8 years ago]

any update on this matter?

Thanks

[@deserthighway Participant 7 years, 5 months ago]

any update? I am having the same issue. I am not a programmer so fix needs to be simple