Is a proper migration from vBulletin 3.8 to Discourse possible?

I’ve done a migration from vbulletin 3.8 to Discourse but have several major issues:

  • bbcodes did not migrate properly, having tons of bbcodes in the Discourse now

  • html strings (tables and many more, iframes) didn’t migrate (normal, but is there a way to properly migrate them to Discourse without having html tags anymore?

Has anyone done a proper migration from vb 3 to discourse fixing these problems?

Hi @Juless

Yes, we did it… see this summary for example:

You can see the results at our site.

It was very labor intensive and a very tiring process to get it nearly perfect because of 15 years of nested bbcode and a lot of mojibake, etc. over the years.

Hopefully, your forum is not “coding intensive” with over a decade of nested bbcode like ours.

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I’ve done many, as imports are a considerable part of my living. They often require considerable fussing with the issues that you describe. It’s typically a matter of deciding how many of the issues that you have can be automatically fixed up. Often, the messages didn’t even display properly in the original forum!

Some of the bbcodes might be fixed if you set @bbcode_to_md = true. Others might be fixed with the bbcode plugin. The tables and iframes will be considerably more fussy, I imagine.

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Where can I set the bbcode_to_md? Thanks.