vBulletin to IPB conversion and missing PMs

[NeedCoffee]

Hi guys,

We are migrating a large forum from vBulletin to IPB. We've done plenty of testing and had some great support from the IPS team. Unfortunately, at the very last moment, we discovered a bit of a 'oh no' moment. 

The standard converter will not import PMs from vBulletin if they are replies only, i.e. not you don't have the original first message. The problem is that lots of users, back in the days of the vBulletin PM system, would only keep the last reply (to keep within their quota) or perhaps only keep an occasional reply if it had something useful in it. These types of messages disappear when we do the conversion as the IPB converter cannot re-create them as conversations.

I was curious to know, for those who did large vBulletin to IPB conversions, what did you do about this issue? Were you aware of this issue? If you were, then how did you handle it with your users - did you tell them up front or did you offer some kind of temporary recovery system (i.e. offline copy of vBulletin?) for those who lost replied messages that they needed?

[NeedCoffee]

On a related topic, does anyone know of which large IPB forums came from vBulletin, i.e. did the whole conversion thing?

[Ramsesx]

59 minutes ago, NeedCoffee said:

did you tell them up front

I told them some days before conversion to save all personal messages.

Another thing you should know, IPS didn't converted the post quotes titles correct. The user quoted isn't clickable and there is no link to the quoted post.

And if you're using the Vb public messaging system in profiles, all messages are converted over to the IPS ProfileStatus Updates System. But it isn't really comparable, the messages are there but not on the place the user expect it to be. For example, if somebody posted a message to your profile, now after conversion the message is in the profile of the sender.

That was my experience converting from vB 3.8. All other stuff was converted without issues, just be careful to choose the right storage system (file system vs. database). And very important, try to convert your forum on Monday because the main working time of the support staff is Monday-Friday.

[NeedCoffee]

Hi @Ramsesx, thanks for that - it's nice to hear from someone else who has been through the process. At the moment, we're thinking of warning them about this issue of PMs not being brought over, encouraging them to make manual copies. We're also wondering about maintaining an offline copy of the old vB site, and offering users the ability for us to send copies of missing PMs for a fixed period (3 months perhaps). It's a bit of a PITA as we're seeing quite a lot of messages disappear when comparing vB inbox vs IPB inbox and we have 195k users.

I appreciate the tips on support too. We paid up for the priority support, to try and help. @Rhett and team have been helpful with the test migrations we've done. I guess my only feedback would perhaps to make it more obvious, inside the Conversion interface of IPB, to warn forum owners that PMs from vBulletin will not be imported unless the first message in the chain still exists. We found out by good fortune. Apologies if it's already in the documentation anywhere though!

[Ramsesx]

24 minutes ago, NeedCoffee said:

about maintaining an offline copy of the old vB site

That's a good idea, I kept a vB copy for myself to access data not converted over.

25 minutes ago, NeedCoffee said:

It's a bit of a PITA as we're seeing quite a lot of messages disappear when comparing vB inbox vs IPB inbox and we have 195k users.

Yes, that's not cool, the personal message system lacks in functionality if you have stored more than 100 messages, searching of messages is limited to the last 6 months or so and the missing pagination.

195k is a big number, guess you will have a lot of fun after the conversion.  Hope it goes well for you, keep us informed on your experience.

 

[Thomas P]

On 11/11/2018 at 12:08 AM, NeedCoffee said:

I was curious to know, for those who did large vBulletin to IPB conversions, what did you do about this issue? Were you aware of this issue? If you were, then how did you handle it with your users - did you tell them up front or did you offer some kind of temporary recovery system (i.e. offline copy of vBulletin?) for those who lost replied messages that they needed?

We converted from vb3.8.x to IPB 3 and are on 4 since a while. We had roughly 1M posts and 65K users at that time.
Our major goal is to keep all content, i.e. posts and threads from the beginning of time, which is 2001 in our case.
We haven't experienced any user stating an issue, but never heard of deleting first post and keeping only replies. I guess this has to do with orphaned entries...

[NeedCoffee]

1 hour ago, Thomas P said:

but never heard of deleting first post and keeping only replies. I guess this has to do with orphaned entries...

It's specifically relating to the Private Messages on vBulletin and the way the IPB Converter handles them. Basically, unless it can find the first message in a chain of replies, then it won't convert/import the PM in to IPB. This is because it's trying to convert the single PM system of vBulletin in to the conversation system here. There wasn't really a good solution on offer, so we've had to basically warn the users that replies in their current inboxes may not be brought over to IPB.

[CoffeeCake]

Verifying that this is apparently still an issue. We've engaged IPS support.

[jesuralem]

I migrated 3 months ago and i have to say i overlooked this issue, but nobody complained so far so maybe my users did not use to delete first posts of PM.

On all other aspects the migration went quite well and users really reacted well to the new forum, way better than when we did VB3 to VB5 upgrade (honestly i should have migrated to IPS directly...).

[CoffeeCake]

We're trying to determine the scope, but it looks pretty widespread at the moment. None of our testers noted it.

The issue appears to be when the initial message in a thread of messages is deleted. The converter doesn't attempt to handle messages that don't have a valid reference to first post id.