XF 1.5 Where to run a VB -> XF import process?

[SeaDog]

We're on vBulletin 4.2.x and here are the main stats:

• Threads 32,631
• Posts 827,031
• Members 33,921

We currently host our site on a VPS from 1&1, it's cheap and cheerful but seems to work well. It's a 2 vCores Intel® Xeon® Processors, 4 GB RAM.

However I don't think it will have enough 'juice' to handle an import of this size?

Is there somewhere, a temporary host, that we should setup (we're happy to pay) to do the import before moving it back? Like Linode?

What do you think?

 

[Paul B]

I can't imagine there would be any issues running the import.

Both VB and XF would need to be on the same server, so if you did set up a temporary server/host, you would need to copy the VB database and files (attachments, avatars) to it.

 

[xenfans]

I've done many imports with over a million posts, those server specs will do just fine. Best of luck moving to xenforo, it's the forum upgrade your community will appreciate.

 

[Mr. Jinx]

+1
Those specs should not be a problem. The importer is very friendly and works with small batches to avoid server overload.

 

[SeaDog]

We're currently running a development version of our new forum - is there any way of wiping the test data (posts, users, profile data) before running the import?

The development version is on "new.domain.com" is there a search-and-replace feature for after the import for when this prefix is removed?

 

[Paul B]

This guide explains the process for test imports: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/importing-guidelines.25325/

If you don't have a pre-import backup, you will have to wipe it and start over.

The only thing to update when moving domains is the Board URL.

 

[SeaDog]

Thanks for that, we're slightly confused though - our development version is full of junk users and posts, will we need to manually wipe this junk content or does the importer do this?

 

[CvP]

Manually. Best way is to drop that dev database and install a fresh XF copy.

 

[SeaDog]

Is there any way of us bringing across the settings we have on our current dev version into the new installation?

 

[Alpha1]

You can use slaviks ghost addon.
The import process is single threaded which means that it doesn't matter how many cores you have. What matters is the speed of the core. I used a server with 4ghz fast core for the import. Setting the database to innodb increased speed as well.

 

[SeaDog]

Hi all, we've taken your advice and have run an import which on the whole seems to have gone well.

We were running a mentions plugin on vBulletin which hasn't carried across properly into Xenforo - see screenshot attached below. How would we convert this into the correct format for Xenforo? If this is not possible, can we run the import again and somehow stop this tag from showing up?

 

[Paul B]

You would probably just have to remove that content from the posts.

You can use this add-on to do so: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/post-content-find-replace.1549/

 

[SeaDog]

Thanks, that was useful.

We encountered an issue in our import where our vBulletin User Profile Fields didn't all get brought across correctly. We have two fields, one for team badges and one for countries, that are set up in the same way, but only the latter was brought across. The configurations of both fields are shown below:

For some reason the Club/Nation field didn't get brought over and isn't showing on the XF back-end, while the Country Flag one worked fine. The xf_user_field table in the database is also shown below:

Might it be because the 'Club/Nation' field has a / in the name that caused an issue?

 

[SeaDog]

Just as an update to the above, we retried the import having removed the / in the Club field name, but still only the Country Flags actually imported. Any ideas why this might be?