[Forum] Clean upgrade & recode

[dpwiz]

We have 3.8.x site dragged through almost all 3.x series and now want a "clean install" without any of installed plug-ins, hacks and all that stuff.

Also, our database charset was incorrectly set to latin1 (by default i suppose), but stored data is in cp1251. We want our new 4.x site to be in utf8, but having tried some dump flags and iconv modes, nothing works.

Is there an export/import tools or commands what could help us with this twisted things?

[borbole]

We have 3.8.x site dragged through almost all 3.x series and now want a "clean install" without any of installed plug-ins, hacks and all that stuff.

Also, our database charset was incorrectly set to latin1 (by default i suppose), but stored data is in cp1251. We want our new 4.x site to be in utf8, but having tried some dump flags and iconv modes, nothing works.

Is there an export/import tools or commands what could help us with this twisted things?

If you uninstall all the plugins and hacks you have installed, they should automatically undo any changes that they made when installed. If you want to change the db coalltion character to utf-8, upload the below attached file to your forum root and call it from the browser. But first open it up with a php editor program and enter your db name, passord, username etc.

[dpwiz]

That's nice, is it possible to do a clean install of 4.0 and then just import users and topics? Looks like our db is full of messy stuff of ages.

[beishe8]

If you uninstall all the plugins and hacks you have installed, they should automatically undo any changes that they made when installed.

Yes,they should but not all of them do.

[Trevor Hannant]

Try this tool from over at vbulletin.org to clean up your database prior to upgrade:

Table and Field Comparison Utility: Compare your database to out-of-the-box vBulletin

[Biker]

Do NOT rely on the comparison plugin as it will identify items such as your blogs as being something that's not part of the original installation. And beishe8 is also correct in that uninstalling a modification does not always revert things back to normal.

Our site was pretty much in the same boat. TONS of modifications added, removed, changed from the early days of 3.X. Here's what I did.

Removed all modifications (except for the blogs).
Reverted all the templates back to original.
Created a new "default" style, then removed all the additional styles.

Now, here's the one that's going to create the most headaches.

Go into the database and manually remove all items that belonged to the old modifications (I used phpMyAdmin for this). Be very careful when you do this, and make a backup of the database before you start playing with it. I was amazed at the amount of stuff that was in the DB that wasn't even used any more. I actually did this step first, and worked on it over the course of a few days before deciding I was ready for the actual upgrade to 4.0x.

[dpwiz]

Looks like i've managed to upgrade cleanly with one error on step 12 (looks like changing db indexes took too much time for frontend proxy).

I did run convert.php provided by borbole (thnx!) and all my tables set their collations to utf8. Everything looks fine now BUT pages are still in cp1251 (and HRUs just skipping non-ascii characters).

[dpwiz]

a little update on encoding fight. i've been trying to dump (with mysqldump) into something sensible and only managed to export texts unmangled with "--default-character-set latin1" option. 'set names' and 'default charset' options in the dump are utf8, but insert contents are in cp1251. And i just can't iconv it because of 'customavatar'-like tables which contains binary blobs.

[dpwiz]

now, that's weird.

i finally got my data in utf8, exported with --hex-blobs, iconv'd it and reimported back. looks like data is now in unicode, BUT i've got a strange "you re banned" error when set $config['Mysqli']['charset'] = 'utf8';

w t f ?

[dpwiz]

any thoughts on this mysterious "ban" and how to lift it?

[sinucello]

Hi,

not for vB4 specifically this article contains some interesting background info on conversion to utf-8:

http://mansurovs.com/tech/converting-vbulletin-to-utf-8

Another interesting tool:

http://www.vcharset.com/

might be useful to first convert an 3.8.x version and then upgrade it to 4.x.

hth,
Sacha

[Endlesskiss]

any thoughts on this mysterious "ban" and how to lift it?

I'm experiencing the same problem...

[Michlerish]

If you uninstall all the plugins and hacks you have installed, they should automatically undo any changes that they made when installed. If you want to change the db coalltion character to utf-8, upload the below attached file to your forum root and call it from the browser. But first open it up with a php editor program and enter your db name, passord, username etc.

Thank you SO MUCH for this! Worked perfectly

[borbole]

Thank you SO MUCH for this! Worked perfectly

You are most welcome. Glad to have been of help

[imedic]

If you uninstall all the plugins and hacks you have installed, they should automatically undo any changes that they made when installed. If you want to change the db coalltion character to utf-8, upload the below attached file to your forum root and call it from the browser. But first open it up with a php editor program and enter your db name, passord, username etc.

Thank you for the file, a life saver . This will convert only original tables of VB or is converting all tables?
I have installed Arcade games after using your file and I have an error of incompatible tables. Arcade has different UTF 8 - can I reuse the file again and change all to the same UTF ?