Popular forum exporters

Jedis

Has anyone tested the phpbb version on phpbb3? I am considering converting my forum to nodeBB, but want to make sure it works.

Thanks!

a_5mith

@Jedis Yupp, when I first tried converting my forum, an SMF exporter didn't exist (until I built one), so my workaround was to import into phpbb3 then NodeBB. Worked fine, only built my own to get around the bbcode ID rubbish that phpbb uses.

Edit: Might have been phpbb2... But pretty sure I used 3. The plugin officially supports 2, but assuming the table schema is the same, it shouldn't be a problem. If you wanted to be 100% sure, you could send a database to @bentael to clarify that the phpbb2 importer will work with phpbb3 too.

bentael

@Jedis to be honest I never had a phpbb2 db to test with, I only tested with phpbb3

If there are any missing fields from phpbb3 that NodeBB could already supports and they are not being migrated, let us know, or open an issue here:
https://github.com/psychobunny/nodebb-plugin-import-phpbb/issues but ping me in it using my github handle @akhoury

k0nsl

Sorry to necro a [somewhat] old topic, however, I've not used NodeBB for sometime now (only loosely followed it's development) and I'm wondering if migration from a somewhat vanilla phpBB3 installation is more or less seamless and without any major issues. Has somebody done it with good success?
I've got a big board that was started in 2002. Emphasis on "big"

Reik

I imported small phpbb3 database of our local students' community about 2 months ago. It took a lot of time to get it to work.
In that time:

groups weren't imported
I had to set by hand all of privileges to categories
attachments weren't imported
parents categories weren't imported
current version was doubling first post of topic, and consequently I had to back to old version of plugins (nodebb-plugin-import and nodebb-plugin-import-phpbb) and back to plugins' supported version of NodeBB
BBCode wasn't converted properly, so I had to use about 7 regex to correct that (automatic links, quote, redundant escaping characters, emoticons)
avatars weren't imported (and it looks like they aren't imported because of that)

JSey

@Reik would you mind to share your regexes here? I'm currently checking my options if I can go down this path - but missing avatars+attachments+first-post-doubling seem like major show-stoppers for me.

Groups and permissions could be something to set up manually once, though.

Reik

I hope this is the most up to date version. You don't have to import database every time, to check if everything is parsed right. Regexes are used always on 'just after import' version of database.

Preparse regex:

content = content.replace(/<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="(.*)">.*<\/a><!-- m -->/g, '$1');
content = content.replace(/<!--.*?--><img src="\{SMILIES_PATH\}\/.+?" alt="(.+?)" title=.+?\/><!--.*?-->/g, ' $1 ');
content = content.replace(/\[(.*?):\w+\]/g, "[$1]");
content = content.replace(/\[(\/\w+):\w+\]/g, "[$1]");

Postparse regex:

content = content.replace(/\\\[/g, '[');
content = content.replace(/\\\]/g, ']');
content = content.replace(/\@"(\w+)?" said:/g, '@$1 said:');

Bonus - Selenium IDE for Firefox script, which makes forum private You need sideflow extension to use it. Use it at categories page in ACP to see how it works.
http://pastebin.com/UdaT0FQF <-- deprecated since v0.7.0