Migrating a PhpBB2 forum to Discourse

Hi all,

I’m a moderator on c-plusplus.net, a site currently employing PhpBB version 2. Switching to a modern software is long overdue, and Discourse is a strong candidate. However, we’re afraid that a migration might be impractical, as the package we’re using is so incredibly outdated.

We are aware that a migration from PhpBB3 is (officially) supported. Is something similar available for the predecessor? Has it been attempted before? Are there known hassles? If someone could share their experiences, that’d be great.

Many thanks in advance!

As migrating from version 3 is supported, would it not make sense to upgrade from 2 to 3 and then migrate?

There’s no direct migration path from phpBB2.

I suggest that you first upgrade to phpBB3 and then use the phpBB3 importer. That should work fine. I myself have a phpBB3 forum that was upgraded from phpBB2 years ago. The migration to Discourse works fine.

Make sure you keep a copy of your old phpBB2 database in case you need it to fixed some issues after the upgrade.

I noticed two problems that were caused by the upgrade from phpBB2 to phpBB3. I’m not sure if they were fixed in later versions of the upgrader or if they still exist. There are solutions for both of them:

• Private Messages can be fixed by enabling an option in the settings.
• Invalid votes can be fixed with this SQL script.

I’ve successfully migrated a phpBB2 forum to Discourse (through phpBB3). See this topic for details of some issues I encountered.

Well, those answers are pretty concordant. @chrisalley, I’m glad that someone has converted a similar forum to Discourse before - that’s the kind of PoC I was looking for. @gerhard Thanks for your list as well, I’ll keep it in mind.

Btw., the gap between our software and this one is astonishing… I can only pray for this to become our new one!