Popular forum exporters
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I originally started this thread as a slight plea, but would like to make it more useful than that. We've already got a UBB exporter/import "plugin".
I've had a look at converting it to work with other forum software (in my case Simple Machines), but it's way above what I can fathom. Now I noticed that an old user on here (@adarqui - inactive) ported his SMF forum over to nodebb successfully and was planning on posting how he did it, but I've not found that, so I'm assuming it didn't happen.
Perhaps we could get some sort of exporters guide for each forum software going, or if anyone fancied having a go at making plugins for exporting the data, this would really help bridge the gap stopping people from jumping over to nodebb.
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This would be an excellent idea, a page on the NodeBB Wiki dedicated to exporters/migration, with sublinks to individual forums solutions with more detail.
Perhaps you can head-up this effort and gather all the existing information we have? @adarqui hasn't been active in a couple months, though... could always bug him again
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I actually have a phpBB version working, although I haven't released it yet. Will see if it works with the latest 0.4x importer and will publish
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@psychobunny Really eager to see what you've made, I've got an IPB forum with 19k posts that I want to move to NodeBB, using phpBB as a bridge.
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Will be working on it in the morning
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@lukelarris woops, yeah I finished it a while ago and kept forgetting to publish it.
https://github.com/psychobunny/nodebb-plugin-import-phpbb/
I built that to migrate https://forum.nfcring.com/ after a lot of trouble I got it to work, so yeah, mileage may vary
If you use it and it works for you, let me know! -
@psychobunny Thanks! I am going to try using this as a bridge to get from mybb to nodebb. Will update you this weekend if it works.
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So you're porting mybb to phpbb and then to nodebb? That's an interesting idea actually. Should look into the forum software with the most importers built for it and then focus making a decent exporter just for that one
EDIT: ah, I didn't even realize that was @lukelarris plan as well. You guys are crafty
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Yep, he mentioned the idea first. But this has been done with various other forum scripts that never got an exporter to a certain one. Just about everything can be converted to and from phpbb, so that tends to be the main bridge people jump to; from my past experiences.
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Cool - well let me know how it goes! The biggest pain for me so far was bbcode. Every forum seems to have their own flavour of bbcode (not to mention addons that extend bbcode), so I could imagine quite a few things might go wrong when migrating twice. Unless of course you don't care about old posts having legacy bbcode
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Haha yeah, I've been exporting through phpBB for years. Would never use phpBB for an actual forum though. Nice to know progress has been made on the importer @psychobunny. You should definitely focus on phpBB for the short term and then expand to cover others in the long term imo.
Will try your importer and see how things go.
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Haha yeah, I've been exporting through phpBB for years. Would never use phpBB for an actual forum though.
rofl!
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@meetdilip I'd recommend migrating that SMF database to phpBB and then using @psychobunny's importer to import your content into NodeBB.
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@lukelarris said:
@meetdilip I'd recommend migrating that SMF database to phpBB and then using @psychobunny's importer to import your content into NodeBB.
Is it easy ? I never converted a DB before.
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@meetdilip said:
@lukelarris said:
@meetdilip I'd recommend migrating that SMF database to phpBB and then using @psychobunny's importer to import your content into NodeBB.
Is it easy ? I never converted a DB before.
It should be pretty easy if you follow the instructions
Turns out the mybb to phpbb migration scripts are not quite as kept up as I had thought. I'm going to have to go mybb->smf->phpbb->nodebb. Or.... write the mybb -> nodebb importer script.
Update:
It also appears that many other phpbb converters seem to be "not well maintained" as well. Things have really gone down hill for them since the glory days. Hopefully there new release coming soon will spark new life. This is the latest version I could find for smf to phpbb. https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=2168572#p13219422SMF on the other hand has a ton of converters with clear instructions these days. http://download.simplemachines.org/?converters
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@HolyPhoenix Here's the MyBB 1.6 convertor I used to convert a small forum with 9k posts: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?p=13553521#p13553521
The MyBB 1.4 convertor has worked for me as well in the past, there's not a lot of differences between 1.6 and 1.4 in the database: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?p=12874980#p12874980
Full list of convertors: https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=1641375
@a_5mith Good luck! Let me know how it goes.
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@lukelarris Got my data into phpbb (hoping it will work for phpbb3, even though psychbunnys plugin says 2(I blame toothache for not spotting that)), I'm now trying to figure out what I do with psychos phpbb exporter as it's not in the plugin list of nodebb.
