Transferring from IPB to vB

[aussiefooty]

Hi guys,

My name is Suzi Olsen and I am from Mount Clear, Ballarat, Australia.
I have got my own forum set up but sadly it is an IPB one and not a vB forum.

My question is am I able to transfer my forum to vB and will it cost me any more money a part from the leased license of $100?

[Floris]

Yes, you can transfer from IPB to vBulletin, keeping your users and data.

No, this is a free transfer, it does not cost anything. We offer the impex software for free to our licensed members. Regardless of license type, and there are no additional costs.

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/impex_module_dump

[aussiefooty]

Yes, you can transfer from IPB to vBulletin, keeping your users and data.

No, this is a free transfer, it does not cost anything. We offer the impex software for free to our licensed members. Regardless of license type, and there are no additional costs.

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/impex_module_dump

Thanks for that Floris. I am seriously looking at setting this up in the next month or two.

[Glathannus]

Jelsoft (makers of vBulletin) themselves won't charge you anything for the transfer, but if you aren't running your own Invision server - if you can't bypass the Invision system to get database access/backups, Invision will charge you somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 USD for a copy of your own database. Beyond that point, the Invision database is yours to do whatever you want with (though Invision may package your database copy in such a way that it can only be restored to an existing database that already has all the appropriate IPB tables/fields - you will have to fabricate a skeleton IPB database first), and Jelsoft won't tack on any additional charges or intentionally make the import process extra difficult.

Now suppose you jump through the initial hoops. A transfer from IPB to vBulletin doesn't go entirely smoothly, and I'm gonna say 60% of that is Invision's fault for being so messy, and the other 40% is vBulletin's fault. vBulletin (as far as I know - in regard to their officially distributed releases) doesn't support nested quotes (quotes-within-quotes). The import process doesn't take this into account, so tonnes of the imported posts that originally had quotes-within-quotes, will get royally screwed up. You can often lose more than simply one layer of the quoting.

If you have something like:

qwerty

jkl;

asdf

You may very well lose everything beyond the qwerty. It isn't simply, you either lose everything outside the jkl;, or you lose only the jkl;. Sometimes in posts that include quotes, you can lose sections of the post that were never in quotes at all.

The imported quotes also won't link to the associated posts like a native vBulletin quote would do, but this is Invision's fault.

Also, if any of your Invision threads have secondary titles, those won't carry through either. Just like with nested quotes, you can't bring information in, for features that vBulletin doesn't support. You can't even side-bar the "currently useless" info for a later date (for when vBulletin might finally support the feature that info was meant for) - not without remaking Impex yourself.

Also, every post or PM that carries over, has to come from an Invision user account that still exists, and still has a registered email address on-file. If an old user account doesn't carry over (because it doesn't exist or it doesn't have an email address), nothing associated with that user will carry over, except other people quoting that user. The problem isn't specific to the messages from deleted/excluded/etc. users. Not even anything in your sentbox to a deleted/excluded/etc. user, will carry over.

An Invision database also has completely separate copies of the same PM for sent & received. If both the sender and the recipient of a message still had copies of that message before the import, they will each have two copies of that message after the import. The only way to fix this is to browse through the database yourself (through something like phpMyAdmin) and delete all the duplicate entries before conducting the merger.

If an Invision user doesn't have a name, they won't carry over. If more than one Invision user has the same email address, one or both of them won't carry over, and then this of course has a ripple effect on the posts and the PMs. If you ran a very tight ship during your Invision days, you will have a lot less problems with your import, though I'm not sure how much Invision screws up the database before they sell it to you. It might be possible that some random users who had associated/registered email addresses to begin with, suddenly lose that information before you've even received your copy of the Invision database.

I also don't know how Impex handles password hashes. If IPB 1.3 (I'm not sure about the later versions) uses a straight MD5 with no salt, it would make sense for Impex to simply add salt and do a rehash, but I'm not sure that Impex even bothers with that. vBulletin might simply demand that the user resets their password so vBulletin can hash the new one properly.

[MRGTB]

I never knew that, if you host with IPS you are charged to get a copy of your database. WOW

[Glathannus]

The bigger your community's total postcount is, the more Invision charges you for the database. You could be paying $100 or more if your community has a huge history.

When it comes time to restore/extract the SQL dump into your own hosting, there has to already be a complete IPB layout for where your SQL dump is going to. Like you would need a host-it-yourself IPB installation just to get a skeleton IPB database started, then you can get your purchased IPB database copy into your own SQL hosting, and then you can finally import from IPB into vBulletin. But that's just the beginning of the end...

Then you can do test imports, to find out how much of your IPB database isn't getting through to vBulletin, and then you can spend hours or days in phpMyAdmin - manually cleaning up your IPB database so that it's all nice and neat for the way Impex wants it. I can almost guarantee that the time you spend doing this, will be worth more to you than whatever you paid to Invision for your database.

[Steve Machol]

I think only InvisionFree charges you for the db.

[aussiefooty]

I think only InvisionFree charges you for the db.

Cheers for that. No I don't have InvisionFree, thank god....

I am seriously looking at doing this in the next couple of weeks. It could happen as early as next week. (I just have to wait until I get paid before paying with my Visa Debit card)

[l SKN l CHRIS]

All your users will lose their passwords and will have to refresh them. Every time I've switched a board from IPB to vB we lose about 50% of the members.

[Glathannus]

If the original password is a straight MD5 hash with no salt, you can manually salt & rehash each account so that the users are never asked to reset their passwords. I wouldn't do this if you had more than a thousand accounts.

[aussiefooty]

All your users will lose their passwords and will have to refresh them. Every time I've switched a board from IPB to vB we lose about 50% of the members.

I will tell them before I make the move across to register with a new account.

I understand that. In fact I don't mind that as some of those people who want this to happen know that they have to create a new account.

[l SKN l CHRIS]

I will tell them before I make the move across to register with a new account.

I understand that. In fact I don't mind that as some of those people who want this to happen know that they have to create a new account.

They don't need a new account, they just need to reset their password after the import.

[NegativeSmoke]

By using the "Forgot password" feature, in which case a new one will be generated to them...

Also, if they had to make a new account then what would be the point of using ImPex in the first place?

[aussiefooty]

By using the "Forgot password" feature, in which case a new one will be generated to them...

Also, if they had to make a new account then what would be the point of using ImPex in the first place?

Because apparently they will lose their original accounts and I want to keep all the same threads on there.

[Floris]

Users who make the mistake thinking a new account will resolve it all .. can always be merged later when they change their mind again.

vB has a default feature 'merge users' where two accounts can get merged. Threads and PM, etc will then be updated and the source account will get deleted.

Account management is quite advanced.