# vBulletin 5 import error (invalid character in website field) and a quick question about attachments

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/vbulletin-5-import-error-invalid-character-in-website-field-and-a-quick-question-about-attachments/161108>\
**Category:** Migration\
**Tags:** vbulletin5\
**Created:** [August 17, 2020, 8:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/vbulletin-5-import-error-invalid-character-in-website-field-and-a-quick-question-about-attachments/161108 "2020-08-17T08:23:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Canapin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/canapin/32/119591_2.png) [@Canapin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Canapin)\
**Post date:** [August 17, 2020, 8:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/vbulletin-5-import-error-invalid-character-in-website-field-and-a-quick-question-about-attachments/161108/1 "2020-08-17T08:23:15Z")

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Hi guys!

After importing my first old forum from phpbb 3 years ago, I’m happy to have motivated an international community forum admin to migrate another, larger forum (180000 members, 1.6M messages) to Discourse. 🎉

This forum uses vBulletin5.

The import worked well until user number 71712, the reason being invalid characters in the website field:

`:website=>"http://url-redacted.com - æåñòêîå ïîðíî ñìîòðåòü îíëàéí",`

The two resulting error messages:

`1: from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.6.5/lib/ruby/2.6.0/uri/rfc3986_parser.rb:73:in `parse' /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-2.6.5/lib/ruby/2.6.0/uri/rfc3986_parser.rb:21:in `split': URI must be ascii only "http://url-redacted.com - \u00E6\u00E5\u00F1\u00F2\u00EA\u00EE\u00E5 \u00EF\u00EE\u00F0\u00ED\u00EE \u00F1\u00EC\u00EE\u00F2\u00F0\u00E5\u00F2\u00FC \u00EE\u00ED\u00EB\u00E0\u00E9\u00ED" (URI::InvalidURIError)`

and:

`1: from /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.5/gems/addressable-2.7.0/lib/addressable/uri.rb:2394:in `defer_validation' /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.5/gems/addressable-2.7.0/lib/addressable/uri.rb:2475:in `validate': Invalid character in host: 'url-redacted.com.com - æåñòêîå ïîðíî ñìîòðåòü îíëàéí' (Addressable::URI::InvalidURIError)`

If the URL “must be ascii only”, maybe the field content could be just removed or sanitized instead of throwing an error and stop the script? 🤔  
I’ll try to have this user removed from the database before trying to import again.

Plus I have another question. The avatars are stored in the database and they were successfully imported.

**But what about the attachments?** In my case, they are also in the database as it is by default with vBulletin. Will they be imported, or must they be stored as separate fields?

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_[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/vbulletin-5-import-error-invalid-character-in-website-field-and-a-quick-question-about-attachments/161108)._