vBulletin Importing - 3.5?

[ZacUSNYR]

I haven't wanted to upgrade my custom site in years. Running on 3.5 . Never was a fan of the interface on 4 or the whole fiasco that went on with vBulletin in general. Plus the licensing is now a joke.

Found XenForo and it seems exactly what i'm looking at for my upgrade path. Planning on taking my data (Users/passwords/forum layout/threads/posts/possibly polls and attachments) and going to ipb but this software is very interesting.

Reading some of the threads here - see the converter is for 3.7/3.8? What would be my import success going from 3.5 to XenForo?

Thanks for the help and keep up the great work!

 

[Paul B]

Are there major database schema changes from 3.5 to 3.7?

I'm not familiar with vBulletin at all but I suspect there shouldn't be too many problems.

Is there any reason why you can't upgrade to the latest 3.x vB version before converting?
It would be a simple job to update to the latest version and then do the import to XenForo.

 

[ZacUSNYR]

I'm not familar with the DB structure post 3.6 - so i'm not sure. I didn't bother with my maintenance update because of how tweaked I had this one forum. Sold off my other 2 licenses before 4 hit. Been out of it for a little while. So my latest download is in the 3.5 seed unfortunately. I'll give it a shot and report back with my results lol

 

[ZacUSNYR]

Given our background, we have a fully-armed and operational vBulletin 3.x importer ready. We also have a tool that you can deploy that will catch links destined for forums, threads, posts etc. from your old board and redirect them (with a 301) to the newly-imported XenForo versions, so that Google and users coming from search engines are seamlessly directed to your XenForo content (and Google will register the 301 redirect so you there will be no penalty for the change of URL scheme.

Found that - I'm going to go for it

 

[Paul B]

This may be of some help

http://xenforo.com/help/importing/

There are also some useful FAQs in the links in my signature.
Or you can get to them from the Information tab in my profile: http://xenforo.com/community/members/brogan.521/

 

[borbole]

I haven't wanted to upgrade my custom site in years. Running on 3.5 . Never was a fan of the interface on 4 or the whole fiasco that went on with vBulletin in general. Plus the licensing is now a joke.

Found XenForo and it seems exactly what i'm looking at for my upgrade path. Planning on taking my data (Users/passwords/forum layout/threads/posts/possibly polls and attachments) and going to ipb but this software is very interesting.

Reading some of the threads here - see the converter is for 3.7/3.8? What would be my import success going from 3.5 to XenForo?

Thanks for the help and keep up the great work!

I think the converter will work fine with your version as well.

 

[Phillip]

Earlier, wasn't the 3.x importer only compatible with vBulletin 3.7 or 3.8? Has this changed to support any 3.x version? We're running 3.6 so if so, this would make the import a little easier.

 

[Paul B]

It is still officially a 3.7/8 importer.

 

[Dean]

Found that - I'm going to go for it

Well, if you are going for it, you could do a test import to see how well it imports. I've got a hunch all would be well enough imported.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Well, if you are going for it, you could do a test import to see how well it imports. I've got a hunch all would be well enough imported.

IIRC, weren't vB's database changes between versions mainly additional tables or additional fields added to existing tables? I am thinking the core vB information is probably where XF needs to find it.

 

[Dean]

IIRC, weren't vB's database changes between versions mainly additional tables or additional fields added to existing tables? I am thinking the core vB information is probably where XF needs to find it.

I believe you are correct, but am not 100% sure. Tables and fields were probably added in the newer versions, but I cannot say the import will work with any certainty.

 

[Wildcat Media]

That's true. I am working on a mess of an import right now...can't import polls from phpBB2 to vB to XF without losing the counts. Plus, trying to import WebBBS into either phpBB2 (I have an ancient Perl script that worked previously, but not now), or to vB (which from my glance, isn't even written right to work...and of course, vB won't support it ).

To say this has all been a learning experience is an understatement.

 

[Paul B]

It was confirmed today that importing from 3.6 doesn't work so 3.5 also won't work.

There are database schema changes from 3.5/6 to 3.7 so you will need to first upgrade your vB installation before importing.

 

[ZacUSNYR]

Thanks brogan. Helps a ton.