[UW] FCS vBulletin 5 Importer 1.0.1

[UW] FCS vBulletin 5 Importer extends XenForo's official vBulletin 5.x importer to fix the one thing it handles poorly: post comments.


Left to the standard importer, vB5 comments are pulled into your threads as ordinary replies — scattered out of context and stripped of any link to the post they belonged to.

This add-on intercepts those comment nodes and imports them into the UW Forum Comments System instead, each one preserved as a proper comment on its original post, with author and timestamp intact, all in a single import run. Requires the XenForo Importers and UW Forum Comments System add-ons.


Moving a vBulletin 5 community to XenForo is straightforward — until you look at your comments. XenForo's official vBulletin 5.x importer does bring them across, but not as comments: because vB5 stores comments as text nodes beneath a thread, the importer treats them like any other reply and flattens them into the post stream. The result is comments scattered through the thread, detached from the posts they were responding to, with the original comment structure lost.

[UW] FCS vBulletin 5 Importer solves this. It extends the official importer and intercepts vB5 comment nodes before they're imported as posts, redirecting them into the UW Forum Comments System (xf_uw_comment). Each comment is restored as a proper comment on its original post, with its author, timestamp and ordering preserved. You run a single importer — listed in the wizard as "vBulletin 5.x (+ UW FCS comments)" — and get the complete standard migration plus a faithful, structured comment history in one pass, with no separate second import.

Because it's built on XenForo's native import framework, it supports both browser and command-line imports, writes a standard import log for building URL redirects, and scales cleanly to large, comment-heavy boards — tens of thousands of comments migrate in a single run. Empty or invalid source comments are logged and skipped rather than aborting the import, so a handful of stray records never derails an overnight migration.

Requires the official XenForo Importers (XenForo Importers 1.6.1 was used) add-on (which it extends) and the UW Forum Comments System (which receives the migrated comments).

Features

• Preserves vBulletin 5 post comments as comments — the standard importer flattens them into the thread as ordinary replies; this add-on routes them into the UW Forum Comments System (xf_uw_comment), each tied to its original post
• Extends XenForo's official vBulletin 5.x importer: one combined run delivers the full standard migration (users, user groups, forums, threads, posts, attachments and more) alongside your comments
• Keeps each comment's author, timestamp, parent post and ordering intact
• Maps comment authors to their imported XenForo user accounts
• Appears as a single wizard option, "vBulletin 5.x (+ UW FCS comments)" — no separate second import pass
• Built on XenForo's native import system: run via browser or CLI, with a standard import log for URL redirects
• Scales to large, comment-heavy communities (tens of thousands of comments per run)
• Robust handling of empty or invalid source comments — logged and skipped so the import never halts
• Honours the standard importer options, including source character-set handling for international and accented text.