Any chance of a ProBoards importer?

[Rob B]

Is there any hope of their being a spider being made like the ezBoard one to import ProBoards forums?

ProBoards is right up there with the most popular remotely hosted options around with over 1.5million boards hosted. It would be good for vB if there is an importer, and I would like to use it

Would ProBoards permission be needed? If so, believe me, there is no hope

[Zachery]

At this time there is no importer for proboards and as far as I know no plans.

There isn't anything stoping you from linking to the old forum once you start up your new site

[Rob B]

My members wouldn't like that. It would mean threads on there would in time be forgotten because they are on a seperate site, and new members wouldn't be able to contribute to them.

Bye bye vB dreams

I am stuck on ProBoards

[Zachery]

You are only stuck there because you insist on staying there, what happens if in the future something like what happened at eZboard happens with proboards? What then? You just keep going?

Some times change takes some big steps, and they can be scary, but a strong community will continue on.

[Rob B]

What happened with ezBoard apart from it becoming transferrable?

As soon as ProBoards is transferrable I am outta there! If not, I will make the switch at some point. It is a big investement, I will have to upgrade my hosting package so am looking at dedicating myself to several hundred pounds a year - with university coming up!!!!

How much do GoogleAds get you?

[Zachery]

It was hacked into, and many commuinties lost all of their data, nota ll of it was recovered.

[Quillz]

The main reason an importer from ProBoards won't happen is because a) ProBoards is closed source and b) ProBoards is a PERL solution based off the YaBB 1.x source code. It would likely take quite a bit of work to convert a PERL board to a PHP/MySQL board.

[Sha]

Yeah, one of the ezboards I'm on lost many posts. The ezSupporter feature is also screwed up for a lot of people. Instead of having 6-12 months, a lot of people have it for 4+ years. ezboard are losing money & I don't even know if they're aware of it.

Anyway, I would switch to vBulletin if I were you. Come on. Look at what they have. I thought phpBB was something great, but vBulletin surpasses many free boards I've come across. I'm about to buy a license now.

[harmor]

I would switch from ProBoards to vBulletin if I were you but your members may not care that you don't have a vbulletin.
You could set up a poll asking users if they want to stick with Proboards or swtich.
If you do state that you cannot transfer the data.

[Elite_Admin]

I copy pasted all the threads I started.I was on proboards for a year.I am about to buy my second vB liscense,Go vB bro,

[feldon23]

The main reason an importer from ProBoards won't happen is because a) ProBoards is closed source and b) ProBoards is a PERL solution based off the YaBB 1.x source code. It would likely take quite a bit of work to convert a PERL board to a PHP/MySQL board.

Not any more work than it took for Jelsoft to write an EZBoard -> vBulletin harvester. EZBoard runs on some ancient multi-server constant-state-of-flux flat-file database crap that is 10x as insurmountable as Perl. It's simply a matter of time and effort and I guess so far Jelsoft feels that the number of hours x $/£/€/§ per hour it would take to develop and test such a tool does not equal how many more ProBoards users would run out and buy vB if a converter was available.

There's also a free open source EZBoard -> phpBB harvester over at SourceForge. I don't know how well-supported it is and it has many quirks. So clearly it CAN be done.

ezboard are losing money & I don't even know if they're aware of it.

Oh they know it. That's why they are debuting yuku.com and going to force everyone to switch from EZBoard to Yuku and phase out EZBoard as soon as they can, to try to sweep the problem under the rug and hope everyone forgets. I think the biggest problem that EZBoard faces right now is that admins are not capable of downloading a backup of the forum data. 9 months after the president of the company said that there would be a method for admins to download a backup, nothing has been delivered. Of course there are many other problems with EZBoard such as the pricing structure for medium-sized boards being roughly the same as vBulletin + hosting, and the feature set of EZBoard being roughly equivalent of vBulletin 1.0 Beta or phpBB 1.0.

So far I find Yuku to be VERY slow (performance) and VERY poor on web standards.

[Sha]

So they're going to try & be slick. Typical.

I always found them to be really slow. vBulletin really blows them out of the water.

[Sovereign]

vBulletin blows EVERYONE out of the water. I used ProBoards as a backup when my main forum got hacked some time ago. It SUCKED.

[Rob B]

I think ProBoards offer a lot for the fact they are free.

Fact is, I will be going from paying nothing from the forum to £312 a year (including web host upgrade) so I expect vBulletin to completely blow ProBoards out of the water, anything less and I will be annoyed for that money.

[Rob B]

It's simply a matter of time and effort and I guess so far Jelsoft feels that the number of hours x $/£/€/§ per hour it would take to develop and test such a tool does not equal how many more ProBoards users would run out and buy vB if a converter was available.

Believe me, the demand is there for one. I am an active member of the ProBoards Support forum, every thread mentioning vBulletin is locked, it is on the censored words list, they are worried about vB, the suggestions forum is packed full of requests for vBulletin features, there are lots of threads asking about transfers.

ProBoards is the leading provider of free forums on the internet, or pretty dam close to being - how can a converter not be worth while for Jelsoft?