Importing vbulletin to NodeBB possible
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I have an Offroading community I want to pull away from vBulletin and bring to a new platform. Discourse and NodeBB seem the most attractive of the "modern" approach with Vanilla a distant third.
Do you guys have tools to import vBulletin databases to entice existing forums to move to NodeBB? I believe my users crave a simplified forum approach usable on all devices and this can very well be that solution.
Sorry if I'm in the wrong sub-forum, I thought general was better than Development until you guys decide if this is a viable line of conversation or not.. If you need a test forum I'd be glad to be a part. My members are already expecting us to be down until first week of January while we upgrade.
We have ~1k users and 60k posts. Nothing huge, but for our small niche it's fantastic. Run on an WHM/cPanel based site, dedicated host with another auto forum so we have plenty of room to grow which is always the point of these places no?
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Hey @OutlawedOffroad, glad you think NodeBB is a viable solution
Right now we have a UBB migrator written by @bentael. I'm working on a casual phpBB migrator mainly just to move over one of my own sites
Our plan is to hopefully have a migration tool for each of the major forum platforms out there. Hopefully vBulletin will be something we can consider working on in the short term
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I think as a long time vb admin there is a point where you want a community to remain active but technology has passed their software by. Change or get swallowed up. We're a local group so there will always be a need to exist so advancement of the user experience is crucial.
Let me know if you need a vb install to poke around in. You have my contact info in profile and I'd be happy to chat offline to see if we can help the process along and give NodeBB another way to pull in users (self or service hosted) from the vb group.
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I'd email you, but your privacy settings has your email field set to hidden
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hahaha the irony
I didn't realize that it must be default.. [email protected] -
UBB-migrator is temporary broken today due to a Major Nodebb update unless u use my NodeBB fork
But have no fear, ubb or any BB/Forums admins, a new refactored nodebb-plugin-import plugin is born, which will meet all of the Migrators half-way to import data into NodeBB's Database. Project is 2 hours old, stay tuned.
All you have to do is extract your data from your BB into few structured files, which the importer can understand, I will provide an example "exporter", which will be the new ubb-exporter, stay tuned for the example here nodebb-plugin-import-ubb,
ETA 24 hours.
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+1
awesome!
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UBB-migrator is temporary broken today due to a Major Nodebb update unless u use my NodeBB fork
But have no fear, ubb or any BB/Forums admins, a new refactored nodebb-plugin-import plugin is born, which will meet all of the Migrators half-way to import data into NodeBB's Database. Project is 2 hours old, stay tuned.
All you have to do is extract your data from your BB into few structured files, which the importer can understand, I will provide an example "exporter", which will be the new ubb-exporter, stay tuned for the example here nodebb-plugin-import-ubb,
ETA 24 hours.
@bentael if you need a database sample from a vb 4.2 system just let me know, glad to provide some data to help the cause.
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The IMPORT part is, .. done, still at v0.0.1 but works.
see https://github.com/akhoury/nodebb-plugin-import@OutlawedOffroad
If you can export your data in the right format, the import plugin will consume it and import it to NodeBB's database of choice.I am in the process of writing a sample 'exporter' for UBB Threads, VB was not on a plate to be honest, but after the UBB one is done, ETA 1-2 days, writing one for VB 4.2 should be a very similar and painless process.
I can def help you out, but I don't want to be taking work from the NodeBB team.
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Definitely not stepping on any of our toes @bentael - appreciate what you've done so far. If you don't end up doing it, I could try. I'll write the phpBB one first because I'm more familiar with the data structure
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OK cool.
@psychobunny if you havent written the import part right, it would be nice if you can use the nodebb-plugin-import, try to generate the right files,
the UBB example is done, well it works, nodebb-plugin-import-ubb if you want to take a look, both plugins arent optimized yet, the exporter wrote 350k+ record in about 14 minutes, the importer, oh well, NodeBB.Post.create( ) is killing me, @baris pointed me the right direction here, I will try his workaround tomorrow.
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sounds good, I'll have a look at what you did and try to emulate with phpBB
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I might actually try and do a conversion for phpbb2 as well for http://www.adr-rpg.com
this will be interesting.
p.s. I personally think that feed.js should only update the .rss once per hour (for example). This will solve your problem and also not blow up a busy forum. I'll put an issue up.
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Don't update rss feeds every post · Issue #645 · NodeBB/NodeBB
Maybe update it once an hour, or so. Great for really busy forums. side effects include preventing migrators from blowing up your server
GitHub (github.com)
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@psychobunny Thanks, I replied on there. Oh and i'll just leave this here:
Stats:
- 350k+ records
- Source forum: UBB
- Target forum: NodeBB
- System: Macbook Pro 2.6Ghz i5 8gb-ram 256gb-ssd
- Export time: 8 minutes
- Export tool: nodebb-plugin-import-ubb
- Import time: 13 minutes (with a tiny temp hack to Post.create)
- Import tool: nodebb-plugin-import
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wow awesome!
congrats
