Merging two vBulletin sites - Need serious advise

[trailerswanted]

I have a forum on it's own url that is running vBulletin 4.2. We have almost 1,700 members and 85,000 posts.

I bought a competitor site that is 5 years old, 15,000 members, over 600,000 posts, and running vBulletin 3.8.2. This site is obviously on its own url and server and gets around 5,000 visitors and 60,000 pages views a day. So we don't wanna screw anything up here.

The goal is to merge the sites into one big one on my url that is running vBulletin 4.2. I would love some advise on the best practices for accomplishing this.

We would like the user names and passwords to merge in along with the join dates... member post counts... and most all of the threads, posts, and pictures.

Also want to do this and make sure that we do not break any of the Google juice and links indexed to the older forum we bought. 301 redirect... htaccess file rewrite... etc etc. What is the best way to do this and preserve all that organic web traffic??

Some initial questions are should I upgrade the vBulletin 3.8.2 to 4.2 so that all the table structure is the same before merging? Is merging two vBulletin sites easy being they are the same structure??

If someone who has some experience with this could share some advise it would be MUCH appreciated!

Thanks gang!

[borbole]

It would be better that both forums should be at the same version for the merge to go through and in the same server. You can merge 2 forums with the Impex System.

[trailerswanted]

Does it go fairly smooth? Keep / merge user names and passwords easily?

Any thoughts on the url redirect from the old domain?

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Does it go fairly smooth? Keep / merge user names and passwords easily?

Any thoughts on the url redirect from the old domain?