As designed vBulletin importers - PMs are imported as separate conversations

[DragonByte Tech]

For some reason, every single individual PM has been imported as entirely separate conversations, instead of as threads. I now have 225 pages of conversations where on vBulletin I had 37.

Can you please advise how I can merge all of these conversations into their correct threads?


Fillip

 

[Chris D]

Were you using an add-on to group PMs into conversations/threads in vBulletin?

IIRC stock vBulletin has zero concept of the relationship between PMs and therefore all we can do is import each message as a separate conversation which is, to all intents and purposes, exactly how they are in the vB database.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

Were you using an add-on to group PMs into conversations/threads in vBulletin?

I'm thinking of the "Message History" feature in vB which loads the previous PMs in the thread via AJAX.

IIRC stock vBulletin has zero concept of the relationship between PMs and therefore all we can do is import each message as a separate conversation which is, to all intents and purposes, exactly how they are in the vB database.

You are correct in that if I send a PM with multiple CC or BCC recipients, a separate PM thread gets created for each user. Furthermore, I'm not entirely sure what would happen if the user deletes the first PM they receive, whether future replies will get a new parentpmid set to 0 or what. I'll investigate.

EDIT: vBulletin doesn't clean up the "parentpmid" column, so it may be a bit of an ask for the importer to try to work that out in this case...


Fillip

 

[Steffen]

Interesting, I didn't know about parentpmid.

One possible issue I see: How do you import conversations where one of the two users has deleted some but not all messages? That's possible in vBulletin but I think in XenForo it's only possible to leave a conversation as a whole (you cannot "leave" individual messages of a conversation).

But maybe I'm missing something?

 

[Steffen]

Furthermore, I think in vBulletin it isn't guaranteed that all messages of a "conversation" have the same recipients. When replying to a PN, you can add/remove recipients (and I guess that wouldn't change the parentpmid).

 

[Chris D]

Yeah all of this sounds familiar. This isn’t a new issue and it applies in XF1 and to many of the sources we import from that have a similar structure.

As such we can’t really do anything to change this unfortunately.