Migration from vbulletin possible?

P Offline

Hello! I was wondering, I have an old vbulletin forum running on vbulletin 4.3.2. It is now locked and only kept as an archive. Would it be possible to migrate it to nodebb and resurrect it? I did a search but relevant topics were several years old.
I am especially wondering what happens with the federation feature in nodebb4 (if it's possible). The old forum has 30.000 threads and over 1.300.000 posts. Will these federate? Or only new topics? Thanks!

J Offline

@panos all threads will federate based on the category's privileges.

Can you reach out to us at [email protected]? Migration is a tricky beast and unfortunately there isn't a free script we can provide to do it

P Offline

Thank you! I might do it in the future, as it was just an idea at this point. Our community is already running a fediverse server (Firefish) and a threaded chat (Zulip). Just wanted to see if resurrecting our old forum might be an option with NodeBB

A Offline

Migration is one of the things I think NodeBB is going to have the hardest time over.
I moved a site that was on SMF 2.1 over to NodeBB recently. I had to manually recreate all my posts and then create the users manually copying their data from the old SMF forum over to the new and resetting a password.
Those users were notified via email that they would need to perform a password reset if they desired to continue using the site.
The adoption rate would probably be higher if there were easy migration from other scripts into it. I am thinking primarily older vB installs, myBB, SMF and phpBB as the biggest ones.

J Offline

@Astro-What would you believe that there could be a solution for that too?

There's a project out there called Nitro-Porter which aims to do that, for all sorts of forum software.

So far they can only migrate away from NodeBB, but if the right client came along we'd be happy to match funding with that client to get a migrator made so that people can migrate to. NodeBB.

A Offline

@julian said in Migration from vbulletin possible?:

@Astro-What would you believe that there could be a solution for that too?

Yes, and I am also aware of several paid services that will migrate from one script to another writing a custom importer/exporter if they haven't already.

It is just a drawback to encouraging someone running another free script to converting over. Most of those running the free stuff are doing so because they don't want to have to spend money.

J Offline

Completely understood, that's why it's always been such a sticking point. We have some migrators available, but it's not always as easy as running a script and coming back to a NodeBB-compatible DB. There are always some thorny edge cases that crop up over and over again.

Unfortunately we're not quite there yet, but perhaps we can get part of the way by consuming an ActivityPub actor's outbox? hmm... food for thought