HOWTO: phpBB3 Beta to vBulletin

[tomzx]

Since I'm sure this will help many, here's an HOWTO guide from moving your BETA (and probably ALPHA) phpBB3 board to the latest version of vBulletin.

This will require you to have impex installed with the phpBB3 ALPHA importer.

Most of the steps are done as you would do it for any other board. This HOWTO mostly contains information about various errors that might occur during the process.

Importing the users
When you'll be importing users, there's a big chance that above 50 users will not be able to get imported due to email error. THIS IS NORMAL. This is due to the fact that phpBB3 has bots considered as users (thus the reason they have no email and cannot be imported). This should not affect the rest of the process.

Importing threads/posts
When importing threads and/or posts, it's propable that you'll be faced with some failures. In many cases, it can be due to the fact that the poster id isn't existant anymore (user was deleted but post kept). You have to choice:
1) Either reassign the posts/threads to another ACTIVE user through mySQL.
2) Delete the posts/threads that are conflicting.

If any questions you have were not answered yet, please ask them here and I shall update this post. Thanks

[Jerry]

Ideally someone who has a beta version, will start a support ticket and ask for me then I'll update ImpEx.

I've done a alpha version, I'll update for beta, then possiably RC, then final when they go gold.

phpBB is an exception to the rule for updating a board during a development cycle like this.

[cbiweb]

Thank you for this thread. I've had to start a closed board for a select few people, and have to use phpbb because I can't afford another vBulletin license right now. But I will be wanting to make the switch soon as I can afford to. I was told by a developer that I will never receive support from phpbb because I started with a beta, and an upgraded beta still receives zero support. So yeah, good to know I'll be able to import my beta to vB.

[jennifer dent]

We have recently purchased VB (finally convinced the big boss lol) and we had quite a few issues with upgrading from GOLD (phpbb)

1) All users became inactive (over 5000)
2) We (the staff) had to reset our passwords before we could log in (this is at our test site)
3) More than 1 FORUM disappeared into the nether regions of the internet...
4) And the order of the forums in not the same either (and I can't find an easy way to re-order them)

Any help y'all could provide would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

(If I should ask this is the licensed members area let me know)

(ps - Can someone point me to the location in the manual that explains how to increase the number of pm's allowed....thx)

[Jerry]

1) All users became inactive (over 5000)

Did you sort out the usergroups ?

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

2) We (the staff) had to reset our passwords before we could log in (this is at our test site)

The will have to be reset :

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

3) More than 1 FORUM disappeared into the nether regions of the internet...

Were they sub forums ? Does this SQL show anything :

SELECT forumid FROM forum WHERE parentid=0;

4) And the order of the forums in not the same either (and I can't find an easy way to re-order them)

Are you using the latest version of ImpEx ?

(ps - Can someone point me to the location in the manual that explains how to increase the number of pm's allowed....thx)

That is a setting of the usergroup the users are in.