Migrate a vBulletin 4 forum to Discourse

documentation sysadmin
,
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Just wanted to leave feedback after our migration from vB4:

  • FIXED Soft-Deleted posts where not properly hidden: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/12057
  • [ul] + [li] and nested [LIST] were not migrated properly and the BBcode plugin doesn’t seem to handle this either → This seems to be expected: CommonMark testing started here! (Quote: Core will not implement [ul] [ol] and [li] support for BBCode cause it is a recipe for failure.) → I will need to build some RegEx magic post-fixup for this.
  • We made an initial migration using the normale importer (took > 3 days) and restarted the migration with newer DB snapshots a couple of times to keep the import “fresh” and reduce the downtime to effectively 30 minutes. This procedure worked quite well, except for everything that was edited after we initially imported the threads, posts. We need to manually rework this information now.
  • Creating Plugins for Discourse is really hard due to lack of documentation and a big picture of how the folder structure works. Though it is getting nicer and better after you understand how it works.

Questions that i have left:

  • I not not sure how the importer maps already imported posts and how to match the old vB4 post_id to the new Discourse post_id to hide those “soft-deleted” post. If someone can give me a hint that would be very welcome! Found it: import_id inside the post_custom_fields table. Nice. Now i need to write some handy script to fix this :slight_smile: → Edit: An even better way is to use the importer script, which maps all imported id’s for easy use.
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