# Is migrating from phpBB to Discourse a good idea

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-migrating-from-phpbb-to-discourse-a-good-idea/15668
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Tags:** hosting
**Created:** [May 15, 2014, 7:53am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-migrating-from-phpbb-to-discourse-a-good-idea/15668 "2014-05-15T07:53:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 8

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### Author: ![neil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/neil/32/102150_2.png) [@neil](https://meta.discourse.org/u/neil)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2014, 7:01pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-migrating-from-phpbb-to-discourse-a-good-idea/15668/8 "2014-07-09T19:01:41Z")

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We don’t have an SMF2 importer yet, because we haven’t had to do an import from SMF2 yet… [We have a few import scripts now](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/master/script/import_scripts). If you’re up for it, you can try writing a similar script for SMF2. The hard part is writing the SQL queries to fetch the data in a format that can be imported into Discourse.

We have a phpBB script now.

> [@phpBB 3 Importer (old)](https://meta.discourse.org/t/phpbb-3-importer/17397):
>
> NOTE: This guide is out-dated. [Follow this guide instead!](https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing-from-phpbb3/30810) I committed [a script to import from a phpBB 3 to Discourse](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/import_scripts/phpbb3.rb), similar to our [Drupal](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/import_scripts/drupal.rb), [Kunena](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/import_scripts/kunena.rb), and [bbPress](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/import_scripts/bbpress.rb) importers. Contributions and fixes are welcome! Thanks to [ruby-bbcode](https://github.com/veger/ruby-bbcode) and @haiku’s [ruby-bbcode-to-md](https://github.com/inflatablefriends/ruby-bbcode-to-md), some bbcode can optionally be converted to markdown before importing into Discourse. I made a fork that does some conversion that is specific for Discourse. The script will also handle some other phpbb-specific markup, like smileys a…

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