Maybe it would be better to say IPB3 is already unsupported. Trying to convert to IPB3 but support basically told me that they don't care if after conversion I lose 100.000 Google backlinks. IPB3 converters redirect scripts are missing a key feature for redirecting a large chunk of old vBulletin URLs. It's a simple fix but support points me to IPB4.

Nevermind that IPB4 converters are beta and unsupported. Nevermind that I spent months modifying IPB3 to server my community.

If IPB3 is still supported like this site says, an issue like this should be resolved. If it is in effect already unsupported, just tell it straight and save everyone involved the time.

I guess it's worth pointing out that the Converters are not a part of IP.Board 3, they're an "IPS Extra".

What is the difference? They are a critical part when converting to IPB from a different software provider. Something that should be as simple and troublefree as possible since it brings new clients.

Its not difficult to do .htaccess scripts on an apache server to cover vB / vbseo to IPB3 links.

I had thought there was a help file on it somewhere in the converter but can't find it at present.

Converter has redirect scripts in place that work great but they forgot about a large part of vBulletin which is the text only versions of pages. Google indexes them and you lose a bunch of backlinks (100.000+ in my case) if you don't take care of the redirects properly.

The redirect scripts for IPB4 have this so it's basically jsut a small tweak for someone who knows what he's doing. Can't imagine why it wasn't done for IPB3 too when they noticed it was missing.

I'm very sorry for your frustration, Tomzl. This has literally never come up before to the best of my knowledge throughout the thousands of vB conversions carried out.

IPB3 is still currently supported, however, we won't be making additional changes to the converters absent a significant bug and this is more of a feature request. With that said, one of the developers whipped this up for you to try. 

RewriteRule [^/]+/archive/index\.php/f-([0-9]+)\.html http://www.site.com/forum/showforum.php?f=$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule [^/]+/archive/index\.php/t-([0-9]+)\.html http://www.site.com/forum/showthread.php?t=$1 [L,R=301]

We hope that helps.

Thank you @Lindy, I had the same idea and was trying to figure out the rewrite rules. With the help of this code and a few tweaks I managed to redirect the URLs. It's now a double 301 redirect but I hope Google won't mind.

4 hours ago, Tomzl said:

Thank you @Lindy, I had the same idea and was trying to figure out the rewrite rules. With the help of this code and a few tweaks I managed to redirect the URLs. It's now a double 301 redirect but I hope Google won't mind.

Double redirects are fine. It's only once you start going over 3 redirect chains that it can become a problem.