EzBoard Import

[Andy Moore]

I see that it is possible to import from EzBoard.

However, I am worried that I will not be able to do the bit with the script to marry the posts up with the authors. Is it hard? Bear in mind I paid for the install service for vBulletin.

[Boxy]

You can request an ezboard import via the Members' Area. We run the import for you as the migration is not straightforward.

[Andy Moore]

You can request an ezboard import via the Members' Area. We run the import for you as the migration is not straightforward.

How easy is it to then associate the imported posts with the new user names?

Does everyone need to be registered on the vBulletin before an import is carried out?

Sorry to sound dim!

[feldon23]

Congratulations on making the migration from EZBoard to vBulletin!

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Importing from EZBoard to vBulletin

Once you buy vBulletin and install it, go ahead and create empty forums for every forum you want imported from EZBoard. You may rearrange the parent/child relationships of your forums if you weren't happy with the structure of your forum and subforums on EZBoard. Freddie B. (staff member at vBulletin who handles all EZBoard -> vBulletin imports) will ask you for a side-by-side list of the OLD forums/subforums and NEW forums/subforums in a text file, e-mail, or Microsoft Word file so he can make any changes from how your old forum is organized vs. how your new one will be organized and imports correctly.

Keep in mind that vBulletin has easy-to-use "mass move" and "mass prune/delete" features which let you search for posts by username, date, time, and then move them to another forum or delete them. It takes a few clicks to move hundreds of threads (what EZ calls topics) or posts from one forum to another. And changing the parent/child relationship between 2 existing, active forums causes no ill effects!


After all of the Threads/Posts/Forums have been imported, your users will need to register for new accounts on your forum. Unfortunately, the passwords and user account information cannot be carried over. EZBoard provides no way for this information to be gathered or downloaded. Now, you can ease the pain for your users in 2 ways:

* Re-associate their old posts which have been imported with their new accounts.
Using this script, which has been updated for vBulletin 3.5.x, you can type in the new (vB) username and old (EZ) username and it will marry all of that user's old posts which have been imported from EZboard to their new account. It's VERY easy to use. You just upload the file and access it through your control panel.

Once you do this, users will be able to Edit their old posts (depending on how long users are permitted to edit their own posts based on settings) and of course that post will count towards the # of Posts they have.

Note: Most users will see an average of 20-40% post count loss due to more accurate accounting of how many posts a user actually has. I don't think EZBoard subtracts deleted posts/threads from users whereas in vBulletin, if you delete a thread, all the users who participated in it will have their post counts docked accordingly. And of course there's EZBoard's colossal security failure last year that wiped out tens of thousands of posts.

* Change their "Join Date" to match when they joined over on EZBoard.
You can go into the Admin Control Panel and change the 'Join Date' for each of your users to when they actually started using your EZBoard forum. Instead of 'September 2005', you can put 'June 2001' or whatever.

Note: Remember that EZBoard has Local Users (people who signed up on EZBoard for YOUR forum) and Global Users (who signed up for access to all EZBoard forums). Their Join Date may pre-date the opening of your forum. You'll have to make a best guess in these cases.

Note: One thing to note, on EZBoard, if a user changed their signature or avatar, it was reflected only in new posts. So as you go back in time and read older posts in EZBoard, you'll see maybe a dozen avatars for the same user. This is because EZBoard runs on a primitive flat file storage system instead of a relational database. On vBulletin, each post by a user will contain their CURRENT avatar, signature, and the # of posts they have accumulated to date. Just an FYI!

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When you upload vBulletin to your web host and run the install script, you'll be presented with an Administrative Control Panel with easily 50 times as many settings and features as EZBoard. Now don't let that scare you -- the most important ones are presented first, and you can be set up in as little as a half hour. But there is a lot of power and flexibility just under the surface.

The concept of having your OWN forum on your OWN server and no longer depending upon those nozzles at EZBoard to make regular backups (which they obviously failed to do) takes a few hours/days to sink in. But once it does, you'll wonder why you stayed with EZBoard so long.
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vBulletin is so worth it. You'll wonder how you ever found EZBoard to be even remotely tolerable! I sure did.

[Tailfeathers]

Sorry for bumping this up, but I'm curious... will vBulletin support imports from Yuku (the new ezboard product where all boards will soon be migrated to)?

[feldon23]

Depends, will EZBoard ever deliver on their promise after the EZBoard Backup Disaster of 2005 to provide site administrators with a way of downloading backups of their forums?

I fear that Yuku will be so Ajax/JavaScript-heavy that it will be difficult or impossible to harvest a forum from it. If the pricing structure of EZBoard is any indication, for all but the smallest forums, Yuku will be more expensive annually than a leased vBulletin license and affordable web hosting.

[Tailfeathers]

Tons of people stayed, the prices will be the same, and the migration will be done by ezboard itself, so nobody will have to move themselves -- so everyone will eventually end up at Yuku. I'm sure a lot of people will dislike it so it'd probably be in vBulletin's best interests to make sure that there is a workable converter for it.

[feldon23]

I tried to use it for about 5 minutes. The JavaScript/AJAX menus don't work very well in Firefox.

I think one of the main reasons people stick with EZBoard is the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) they spread about how "hard" it is to set up a forum on PHP/MySQL even though it's actually a 10 minute task.

[Andy Moore]

I am really glad we changed over to vBulletin from EzBoard.

[feldon23]

The feature set of EZBoard is still, for the most part, about on par with vBulletin 1.0. But the searching is STILL broken and user administration is less powerful.

[CaptainBlue]

I fear that Yuku will be so Ajax/JavaScript-heavy that it will be difficult or impossible to harvest a forum from it.

But Yuku/ezboard/Robert Labatt has stated that there will be a non-JavaScript version.

How they intend to accomplish this on an AJAX structure is another matter, of course...

I can't try it myself, as I've already been banned from Yuku because - they say - I'm actively trying to destroy them (their words, not mine)!