Selective Importing from vBulletin 4

[afonseca]

Hi, I have a question before purchasing xenForo 2. I am coming from vBulleting 4.2.5 and want to import only posts from within a recent date range as there are many old threads that are no longer relevant. Is it possible to do this from the import settings or do I have to import everything and then figure out how to delete the older threads?

If it's the latter, does xenForo provide an easy way to filter all the old posts (earlier than a certain date) and then delete them or possible move them to an archive forum? It's not just an import of all existing content but some re-organization so that is why I'm asking.

Any insight on options to accomplish the above import/reorganization would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[sbj]

Not sure during the import, but after the import definitely.
You can use batch update threads to accomplish what you want. If you look at the demo:





You can select a date range to find matched thread, you can even select the nodes you want to search from.

After that you can move or delete the found threads. I would move them to a special private node and see if all is good. And then delete everything in that node after making sure all went okay.

 

[afonseca]

@sbj, thanks! That is a very nice feature that should do the trick!

 

[beerForo]

You can also delete them in vB before the import using a similar tool (Prune). This may be better if you care about ID numbers and are not retaining them.

 

[afonseca]

@beerForo, that is a good idea too. I can probably backup the latest live vBulletin database to my local environment, prune the old threads, and then use that database for the xenForo import. Thanks!

 

[beerForo]

That's exactly what I did. Trim the fat. Back up so you have it, then make changes to the source. Delete things you don't need like old banned users, forum categories, etc.

 

[dknife]

Just be aware that there's probably very few cases where you don't care about retaining IDs on import. Generally it's something you always want to do to allow redirection.

 

[beerForo]

You can redirect either way.
Retain IDs - htaccess edit
New IDs - provided file

And in many cases it is a personal decision. Either are fine.

 

[dknife]

You can redirect either way.
Retain IDs - htaccess edit
New IDs - provided file

And in many cases it is a personal decision. Either are fine.

Wouldn't simple one-liner regex redirections be much more efficient than potentially massive static lookup tables?

 

[beerForo]

But my point was personal presence. I can expound upon that. It may bother some people to have numbers all over the place like forum 414 and 2113, or user #1 as 233, when they can start at 1 again. Especially if they are cleaning a lot of junk out. Efficiency may not enter the equation for some, for others, yes.

 

[beerForo]

Of course it doesn't matter, but OCD and all

 

[beerForo]

Once google reindexes the script would barely be used anyway. Links from other websites and internal links buried in old posts.

 

[afonseca]

Thanks, I'm lucky in this regard as it's for a private forum for a membership site so nothing gets indexed by search engines and I get to control all referring links. Good things to consider for public facing forums however.

 

[beerForo]

Internal links still matter if someone linked to a post, node, etc.

 

[afonseca]

Yeah, it's not 100% seamless but we'll be informing members of the switch and it would only affect current members that are less likely to have links pointing to posts that go as far back as the ones we're pruning since our membership term is limited.