Fixed SMF Importer bug reports

[leemy]

I got the updated importer on 11/26, so it's not the importer that shipped with 1.4.3.

Mostly, the forum has been operating very well. One major question is, does this migrator handle URL forwarding? I have a popular SMF add-on called PrettyURLs. Can I expect for SEO and legacy support, a URL will forward to the new XF URL?
After the migration:
1. My administrator had no permissions. I had to go into my Administrator user group and grant all permissions in order to just see the forum boards

2. YouTube text matches the Media Site syntax but does not show the preview. If you make a new post with the same URL, it shows properly as a preview.

3. Posts that had colors/sizes attached in SMF ended up in XF as:

[SIZE=1em]Hello,[/SIZE]

[SIZE=1em]It was a pleasure serving as judging coordinator and creative director of WBBC this past weekend. Thank you to all the teams for taking your time and effort to help WBBC succeed. Without the teams, we are nothing. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=1em]With the wisdom of my years on the circuit and on the WBBC board, I have created something I call the Comprehensive Judging System (CJS). This in my mind should be the new standard in judging for the circuit. The CJS consists of a base of the following elements:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=1em]1. Judges who are familiar with the circuit and who understand the genre of the competition they will judge at;[/SIZE]
[SIZE=1em]2. Multi-level or multi-view judging (i.e., Upper and Lower Level) with separate rubrics;[/SIZE]

There's probably a lot of [size] and [color] brackets to clean up.

4. My inbox now shows 1105 unread Personal Messages. I think it is showing every PM as new.

 

[Mike]

In terms of redirects: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/questions-about-smf-import.88043/#post-861716

In terms of #2, can you give an example? Is it just the URL? If so, the importer will bring your posts across. It won't change how they're parsed; the media look up stuff is only done when a post is made.

In terms of #3, size is supported but not that size format -- we only support sizes 1 - 7 or specific pixel ranges, no other units. We don't normally do that much BB code clean up so I'm not sure what we would do with this; this is where the post content replacer tool can be useful.

 

[Chris D]

Yeah with regards to number 2, SMF doesn't support any embedded media sites, so this is just a YouTube URL in a post, so as Mike says, there's not much we're likely to do with this.

That said, I'm pretty sure I've seen examples of YouTube URLs being converted to the relevant BB Code in the aforementioned Post Content Replacement Tool, but this isn't something we handle in any of the importers.

We actually did handle some size code cleanup in the SMF importer due to the fact that the default font unit in SMF seems to be pt which we don't support. The next version of the SMF importer will likely handle em size conversion in a basic way, but until then, yeah, it should be trivial to also handle this in the replacement tool.

Ask in this thread for help and download the resource: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/post-content-find-replace.6548/

 

[leemy]

Thanks guys. It would be nice if the YouTube and bb code cleanup were done automatically but the tool should suffice if I can figure out the RegEx. Am I at risk of crudely overwriting other, working size bbcodes in the XF database? Like will i end up turning my forum into plain text posts?

 

[Chris D]

If you're unsure of exactly the correct regex to use, don't do it unless you've asked for help (in the resource discussion thread).

The YouTube URLs probably won't be handled automatically. There's quite a lot of ambiguity with URLs and whether or not they were intended to be embedded or not. With that in mind, I'd actually think twice about doing the YouTube URLs in bulk. It's not uncommon that someone may have inserted a URL inline within the content, or even embedded in other tags where MEDIA tags wouldn't be supported. So, really, that's more of an "As Designed" behaviour that we don't touch that.

However, we will probably deal with the SIZE BB Code more completely, but bear in mind there may be other permutations that we don't support so again this will be sort of on a best effort basis.

 

[shorepower]

After our migration from SMF (pre-dates the availability of the SMF Importer) we found some inconsistency in the posts. Initially I used SQL directly towards the DB but eventually I got the tip to use the attached tool. Worked very well and helped clean up the posts.

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/post-content-find-replace.1549/

Mostly, the forum has been operating very well. One major question is, does this migrator handle URL forwarding? I have a popular SMF add-on called PrettyURLs. Can I expect for SEO and legacy support, a URL will forward to the new XF URL?

PrettyURL was a pretty big headache for us as it removes any numeric reference. I ended up using a sitemap from SMF and a sitemap from Xenforo, sorting the URL- addresses and after some manual scrubbing made a 401-direct in httacess line by line. Not pretty, fairly time consuming but it solved the problem. After a number of months I removed the 401-redirect as the search engines was done with the index.

Also, make sure you have the same number of posts per page as the longer threads will be numbered. In SMF 20,40.60 etc and in Xenforo 2,3,4 etc.

 

[Eagle]

UPDATE xf_post SET message = REPLACE(message, 'OLDTEXT', 'NEWTEXT');

So...

UPDATE xf_post SET message = REPLACE(message, '[SIZE=1em]', '[SIZE=4]');

It's possible to replace all bb code via SQL Query.

 

[shorepower]

Mostly, the forum has been operating very well. One major question is, does this migrator handle URL forwarding? I have a popular SMF add-on called PrettyURLs. Can I expect for SEO and legacy support, a URL will forward to the new XF URL?

I did not end up using the suggestion @Jake Bunce gave , https://xenforo.com/community/threads/smf-to-xenforo.53887/page-3#post-640077, but this perhaps may help you @leemy

 

[Chris D]

Just to complete this thread:

• URL redirects are not currently planned.
• With regards to permissions, there may be some element of manual work involved for everything to work 100% as expected.
• We won't do anythng with regards to YouTube (or others) URLs in terms of converting them to embedded media as this may not always be desirable.
• We've done some additional work to santize various BB Code including handling EM sizes.
• There's an additional bug report with regards to PM read state so that will be handled there.