[Bug / Issue] Problem with accessing categories and forums after upgrade to vb5

[aeternitasster]

We recently upgraded from vbulletin 3 & 4 to vbulletin 5. Previously we had several categories without name, then upgraded, and all but one of them were assigned a unique URL ident by vBulletin (“-aa”, “-ab”, “-ac”, etc.), so we can access them and the posts contained in subforums without problems. Here is an example to a category (in the meantime we renamed it, but the URL has been preserved to reflect the automatic assignment) and here is an example to a thread.

However, one of them was assigned apparently an empty URL ident, and this one and the posts contained in subforums cannot be accessed (here is a link to a forum in the category in question and a link to an example thread). We've tried creating a new category and moving the sub-forums there, however their URL ident doesn’t change, so we cannot really fix it just by moving these subforums to a new category with a valid URL ident.

How can we fix this? Can we change the empty URL ident via a query? Is there any other way to fix it? Because at the moment the threads contained in this forum cannot even be accessed (see example), so we cannot even move them one by one, even if we wanted to… but since there are thousands of threads, we would need a different solution (a query, or renaming the URL ident or mass-move the threads)… Thanks in advance.

[Wayne Luke]

All of your forums seem to have an empty URL ident actually. The example that you linked to as working should be /forum/general-chat not -ab. The aa, ab, ac suffix is only supposed to be added to duplicate channel names. You do not have any of these. I am guessing you have/had some UTF-8 character in your names and that is breaking the migration in a subtle way.

You can rename the URL but visiting the page, clicking Edit Page, and then saving the page. The save dialog will give you the option to change its URL as well. The system will create automatic redirects and all topics in the channel should inherit the new URL automatically.

For the node/channel, you can't access, get its Node ID from the channel manager (AdminCP -> Channel Manager -> Channel Manager). it should be shown in the list. Then go to /node/NODEID. Edit the page in the same way and update its URL to reflect what you want it to be.