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Importing from vBulletin

BH Brian Hall
Brian Hall
Member
Member since Sep 2013
74 posts
Sep 6, 2013 · 12:09 pm · Edited

So I decided to completely start over with my Simple:Press forums by importing from the original vBulletin source. 

It seems I can’t get a break, because now the importer refuses to import one of the forums.  It reports an error creating a group, but when the import is done the group is there, just one of the forums in the group has none of its posts. (the English forum…).

I don’t see any messages or anything telling me why it failed, just that it failed.  Is there a log or anything I can get a look at so I can try to fix whatever it has problems with in the forum so I can get it imported?

Thanks!

6 Answers

New Answer
BH Brian Hall
Brian Hall
Member
Member since Sep 2013
74 posts
Sep 6, 2013 · 12:20 pm

To add a bit more detail, the vBulletin Forums have the following structure:

Martial Arts
–English
–…
–Various Other Languages (11 total under Martial Arts)
–…

Events Products & Services
— Some forums (5 in total)
— …

Affiliates
— Some Forums (3 in total)

 

When I import, they all come in, groups and forums, but English ends up with no posts. :(

So I read something about sub-forums in vBulletin not working, so I unparented all the forums and had them all have no parent at all.

The importer then saw none of the forums at all.

So I put them back, and get the same problem again, All the groups and forums are there, but English under Martial Arts has nothing in it…

What could be going on here?  I was able to import these things into bbPress with no issue, but maybe this is the source of my problem?

BH Brian Hall
Brian Hall
Member
Member since Sep 2013
74 posts
Sep 6, 2013 · 12:25 pm

Actually, sorry to spam this forum, but my most recent attempt at import has different results.  Now I have other forums that are in the list, but none of their posts were imported. This time two of the forums under the Affiliates group…

 

 

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Sep 6, 2013 · 1:15 pm

The problem here is that I can’t really help or advise on vBulletin. The importer was written by a user after I had actually stated that I didn’t think it was going to be possible to write a script for it as vBulletin is very non-standard on the way it stores data.

The same really applies – I need to see the data. In fact would still prefer to see the data we were discussing earlier in your original bbPress import.

BH Brian Hall
Brian Hall
Member
Member since Sep 2013
74 posts
Sep 6, 2013 · 4:12 pm

I’ve sent you a link to the database backup.

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Sep 7, 2013 · 3:58 am

OK – i see that. Will take a look as soon as I can.

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Sep 7, 2013 · 4:53 am

OK – I can see a couple of things wrong in the database. As follows:

1: Forums (sfforums table)
There is 1 forum record (forum_id 8047) that has the name in cyrillic. This forum entry is lacking a slug which is very much required. This could be created directly in the database.

2: Topics (sftopics table)There are 3 topics with the same issue as above (topic_id 4883, 8459, 8461) which, again, could be easily corrected in the database itself.

And that’s it.I could find no other issues. There may be some but none showed up.

These 4 records are held as html character strings which explains the lack of a slug. This could be because the utf-8 option was not turned on during the import. It might be that the original vBulletin system stored them this way which is something I am afraid I would not know. But Simple:Press can store them in their proper format as long as the database is set up correctly and- as I said above – these entries can be manually edited within the database directly and easily.