vBulletin Conversion Questions

We run a vBulletin forum with about 75,000 members, just under 700,000 posts, and max simultaneous user count of 400. We are planning to upgrade to ASP Playground.

Is there a vBulletin importer? I noticed some posts from 2001 that said there is no importer but am hoping something has been developed since then. We will need to import all users, threads, posts, profiles, etc.

If there is no importer, do you have any suggestions?

Best,
Lee

P.S. Current forum is here: http://chat.provida.com

We do not provide "official" importers. However, a client of ours at rcuniverse.com developed a vB importer and imported more than 1 million of posts. You can contact him using the Private Message on this forum (you need to register first) and here is his profile: RCuniverse

Thank you very much Samuel. I was the one who posted as guest before I registered.

I will check with RCuniverse

Lee

I am also thinking about switching to asp
Please let me know how things went for the conversition from VB to asp
My email is bacanak (A) gmail,com

http://chat.provida.com/forum/default.asp is already running aspplayground

I am the one who converted http://chat.provida.com from vBulletin to ASPPG. There was a tremendous performance increase and the new forums are running smoothly.

It took about 3 weeks to write and test the import routines because we also imported thousands of user photos to the gallery, and we had custom member fields on vBulletin which we brought over to ASPPG. We imported over 100,000 users and just under a million posts.

The only change to the ASPPG database was to increase the field size for the signature field in the members file and the stored proc that writes to it. This is because we had users with long sigs on VB - like 2000 characters. This wouldn't normally be a requirement in a conversion, so it's likely you won't need to make any changes to the database. That's good, so you can remain fully compatible with future ASPPG upgrades.

Once the import routines ran I used some of ASPPG's stored procs to re-index and clean things up. The hardest part of it was getting the sort order on the forums right, but even that wasn't difficult once I understood how the ASPPG sort works. Samuel was very helpful with that.

Here's a quick summary of what you have to do:

1) Clean up any duplicate VB user accounts.

2) If you want to prune any VB posts, now is the time to do it.

3) Import VB Forums to ASPPG

4) Import VB Users to ASPPG

5) Import VB Avatars to ASPPG

6) Import VB Custom Member Fields to ASPPG (if any)

7) Import VB member photos to ASPPG (if any) and if you have photo albums, import them to the ASPPG gallery.

8) Import VB Threads to ASPPG

9) Import VB Posts to ASPPG (Note: Threads and posts from VB both go to the ASPPG pgd_messages table. This causes some duplication because the Thread title in VB is the same as the first POST title. You have to write a routine to clean up the duplicate info unless you combine the thread and post importer into one routine.)

10) Update the forum sort order logic and run ASPPG Proc to rebuild it.

11) Clean up VB tags in posts. VB often uses simulated HTML tags like [font] that might or might not work in ASPPG. Some do some don't. You can use a string function to find and replace these. It can take a long time to run because string manipulation is slow and in our case we had almost a million posts to go through. You could build this into the post importer, but then it would take a long time to do the import. I ran it afterward, because it was not a critical item in the migration.

12) Turn on the full text search feature in ASPPG. This will greatly speed up your searches, especially if you have a ton of posts.

13) Rebuild the full text index

14) Run all ASPPG basic maintenance tasks (in the admin panel).

Best,
Lee

As for the Provida conversion, everything DOES run more smoothly.

My only wish is that you hadn't used the word "chat" in the URL. Our firewall at work blocks sites with that word, although it allows the word "forum" with no problem.

Which means I can only post from home, at night.

Aside from that, I can only say that you did a great job and the conversion looked seamless from the user side.

Claire

I assume your site is listed with search engines.  How does the conversion help retain the listings you currently have?  Meaning if someone searches for something relative to your site, will they be redirected to a specifc post within your previous vb environment or does it get redirected to the new post with ASPP?

The old vBulletin application is long gone now, but here's what I did initially:
 
1) When I migrated all the posts from vBulletin to ASPPG I automatically created a table listing the old vBulletin message ID and the new ASPPG Message ID.
 
2) When people came to a post on the old vBulletin system, I wrote a script to automatically refer them over to the new post on ASPPG. This was done using a 301 redirect, so the search engines would know to spider the new url instead of the old one.
 
3) If the visitor came to any other page on the vBulletin forums (member profile, search page, forum home page, etc) they were automatically referred to a comparable page on ASPPG. This was also done with a 301 redirect.
 
4) After 6 months the vBulletin server was shut down.
 
Best regards,
Lee

hello
I am despratly looking for the code to convert vbulletin to asp playground conversion.
please contact info@sharmainfoway.com if you have it and will you charge for it? how much?

I am also thinking about switching to asp