Vbulletin to Xenforo with paid subs.

[hfgreg]

I have a large vbulletin board that has hundreds of active paid subscriptions. Is there a way to migrate these over without terminating the paypal subscriptions? I would really prefer to talk to part of your sales team via phone if possible.

Thanks

 

[Chris D]

Hello, we don't have a sales team, as such, and all support / inquiries is conducted online.

You can feel free to Contact Us if you wish to discuss your requirements more privately.

Unfortunately there isn't a built in way to migrate them. The likelihood is that they will need to be cancelled and resubscribed to.

It may be possible with some level of custom development to catch and redirect the IPNs going to the old URL but I'm not sure if anyone has attempted or been successful with this.

The other option is to manually apply the upgrades in XF, but how viable that is will depend on how many there are and how frequent they have to be renewed.

 

[hfgreg]

We are very interested in making the jump to XenForo but this would be a mandatory feature for us to migrate over. Is there anyone you can put us in contact with that could custom code this? Feel free to shoot me a price quote on a custom modification.

 

[Chris D]

We don't provide custom development services ourselves. I'm going to mention @Sadik B in the first instance as I did find a post which suggested he thought it was possible. I'm not sure if that ever progressed into anything functional.

Otherwise, a number of developers offer their services here:
https://xenforo.com/community/forums/third-party-services-offers.42/

 

[hfgreg]

@Sadik B if this is plausible please contact me. Thank you.

 

[thedude]

We are very interested in making the jump to XenForo but this would be a mandatory feature for us to migrate over. Is there anyone you can put us in contact with that could custom code this? Feel free to shoot me a price quote on a custom modification.

Some of the folks in here do vb to xf conversions and can probably accommodate your subscription requirements: https://xenforo.com/community/forums/third-party-services-offers.42/

 

[Chris D]

Some of the folks in here do vb to xf conversions and can probably accommodate your subscription requirements: https://xenforo.com/community/forums/third-party-services-offers.42/

I wouldn't necessarily say that's true, though it certainly might be. There's definitely an element of development required, I think, and not all people who offer those services are necessarily developers. Certainly might be something they've encountered before though so definitely worth asking

 

[hfgreg]

Going with a unknown dev is gonna be tough. We need this to properly function. I know the developers of XenForo were the original developers of VB4 so I was hoping there was something in place already. I think going 3rd party is a risk we aren't able to take at this time.

 

[Chris D]

It's less of a risk as long as you use a developer that is well known here with a good reputation.

Do you have any development experience yourself?

Are you able to share with us any of the raw messages which PayPal is sending to your current vB installation (with any personal/sensitive data removed)? Specifically interested in the POST request that they send to your server (in XF we store this in a table as a transaction log).

It might be worth trying to identify if it's technically possible, first. The key thing is to check whether the message sent by PayPal to your vB installation can be used in such a way as to identify the correct user (in XF we populate a special 'custom' attribute which PayPal sends back to us, we just pull the user ID from there). If it's similar in vB then it might be possible.

I'll be happy to try and help if you can provide some more details.

 

[Sadik B]

Hi Guys.

The short answer is yes, it's possible. I have done something similar in the past for a different system not vBulletin. I had done it for recurring subscriptions in a membership software called aMember for wordpress, which were converted to xenforo. Unfortunately I am handling a massive amount of workload at the moment so cannot take up any new projects, so I too would recommend going with some of the better known developers here.

In short, as Chris mentioned, what happens is that any recurring payment profile, irrespective of which Paypal API was used, generates an IPN. vBulletin (versions earlier than 5, no idea what vBulletin 5 does ) would also be sending you a POST Data to the IPN notify url for the subscription (or to your Paypal account's global IPN url, dev needs to check).

What a developer has to do is on that particular url, replace the vbulletin file with a custom file. This custom file should receive the IPN post data and send a 200 ok request back. Then the file should parse the data, identify the vbulletin user, query the mapping table (through the xenforo import log) to find the corresponding user in the xenforo database, and also find the corresponding user upgrade (to the vb subscription) in xenforo. Then it should upgrade the user if the IPN is of subscr_payment, or cancel, downgrade etc depending on the IPN txn_type.

The most tricky part is identifying the correct user. At the very least, you are going to have the paypal email, which may or may not be same as user email in vBulletin. As far as I remember though, vb4 subscriptions did have the userinfo variable, so it should be doable.

Regards

 

[Sadik B]

Ok I did some digging and yes it's definitely doable. The VB form for creating a recurring subscription has this submitted,

<input type="hidden" name="custom" value="$userinfo[username]" />

So it has the vbulletin username. So your custom ipn script can find the mapped user in xenforo. So now you just need to find someone who can write the script for you...

 

[Chris D]

Ugh, that's a little bit inflexible, especially if someone's username has changed. But indeed, it should be do-able.

 

[hfgreg]

Thank you guys for this.. makes it a real possibility. The good news is our users typically keep their usernames. I will look for a dev. Yes, the IPN url is http://www.DOMAIN.com/payment_gateway.php?method=paypal

 

[Jake B.]

Ugh, that's a little bit inflexible, especially if someone's username has changed. But indeed, it should be do-able.

Could probably store a log so that it'll map the old vBulletin usernames to an XF User ID that should help if a username changes after the migration to XenForo to resolve (or at least significantly help) that issue

 

[hfgreg]

Is this a project you would be interested in taking on? @Jake B.

 

[Jake B.]

Definitely something we'd be able to help with, have sent you a PM

 

[Slavik]

Feel free to drop me a PM, have done this for a few customers on request.

 

[hfgreg]

@Slavik PMed you. Can you convert a vBulletin theme to xenforo as well?

 

[hfgreg]

PMed you both back. We are about 95% set on switching over at this point.