XF 1.2 Importing old VBulletin posts into existing XF Forum

[tajhay]

Hi guys,
When i started my XF site, i started afresh. Our previous site was on VB 3.8, however we made the decision at the time to start clean and leave all the crap quality posts behind etc.

Now a couple of years on, Im just wondering if i can import the old Vbulletin database into a new forum section into my site called archive or named something similar. Will that work fine?

Also what about users? I really dont want to create recreate the old vbulletin users again as some of them have re-registered on our xf site with perhaps a different username/ email address etc. If i import the data, can i forgo the creation of users, and dump all the threads into one forum section? Any ideas?

Main reason for importing the old data is - that the data is from 2003 so would be quite nice to go through and see the past of the site, and also for content SEO wise. Ideally i will go through the database and clean it up before import too to remove low quality threads.

 

[Paul B]

The content is imported in with the same structure so you would either have to move it all into an "archive" category first before importing, or do so afterwards.

Threads and posts cannot be imported before users are.
Any duplicate user names or email addresses would need to be resolved.
You could delete all of the users either before or after import if you don't want the posts associated with any existing users.

 

[tajhay]

You could delete all of the users either before or after import if you don't want the posts associated with any existing users.

Thanks Brogan. I could create a new forum structure into the VBulletin install and then reimport it that way. Thats fine.

After your comment about having to import the users, i will update the db to prefix all old VB users to OLD_xxxx

Now after I import, if i delete these OLD_xxxx users, does that mean their link to the member profile will disappear, or will the name associated with the post still show up, just that it wont be linked to anything? If the latter, i might not need to prefix the old users at all.

Also, if I mess up, is there a quick way to undo?

 

[Paul B]

When you delete members in XenForo, their account is removed and any existing posts will just have the user name which doesn't link anywhere.

As always, take a backup before you do anything so you can restore should it all go wrong.

 

[tajhay]

Thanks so much mate. Appreciated!