Redirect after migration

[Black Tiger]

Hello.

I want to migrate my SMF forum to Invision board. I do use a sitemap on the SMF forum.

If possible I would like to keep my position in the earch engines as good as possible, because it's not that much already. 🙂

At this moment my smf is in https://www.domain.com/forum

My Invision Community will be put in the root of the public_html so https://www.domain.com and as far as I've seen the forum will still have https://www.domain.com/forum (or forums?) in a virtual (not physical) way. Because IPS does not have a /forum directory but you see /forum in the forum url.

Anyway, is it enough to enable all 3 redirects in the Invision admin cp and put in the advised .htaccess file which you can download from the admin panel?

Or must something else be done to redirect the smf links to the Invision forum?

 

[Stuart Silvester]

If you remove your physical (SMF) /forum directory (or rename it) and you have the 'rewrite URLs' setting (which includes creating that .htaccess file) enabled in Invision Community, it'll pick up those SMF URLs automatically and redirect them to the relevant locations.

[Black Tiger]

But I do have to remove or rename the /forum directory first? It's not enough to disable access to it?

Because I wanted to let it stay in there after converstion a little bit to be able to check things after conversion.

Because Invision will point to /forumS not to /forum I thought that was possible.

[Stuart Silvester]

5 minutes ago, Black Tiger said:

But I do have to remove or rename the /forum directory first? It's not enough to disable access to it?

Because I wanted to let it stay in there after converstion a little bit to be able to check things after conversion.

Because Invision will point to /forumS not to /forum I thought that was possible. 

Your previous post says that Invision Community would be in the root of the domain. If this is true, then simply removing your SMF /forum/ directory from your file system will allow Invision Community to identify those URLs and redirect them.

[Black Tiger]

Yes I understand that part.

But my question was if it was also enough to disable access to it, since I wanted to keep it for some time to check and verify some things on the old forum after conversion.

 

[Stuart Silvester]

If you change the permissions on the folder so that it's not readable by the web server, then in theory it should work and redirect your request into Invision Community. I would recommend that you rename the folder instead (and update your SMF configuration accordingly) so that you're not going to have potential conflicts with the Invision Community URL routing.

[Black Tiger]

Thank you.

Now I only have to redo the conversion again in the test installation. I'm waiting on an answer to my ticket, but maybe you already know the answer.

I've got 80000 posts which were not converted. However I've seen them being converted and members and topics and post data were selected.

Only things converted were users and passwords and forumtitels, which partly went as category instead of forums. Not even private messages of members, no postings, no calender, nothing else. I've seen the posts conversion passing (took a long time) but nothing went into the database.

This was from an SMF 2.0.15 forum.

Mike thinks there might be made a mistake. I don't think so, but one never knows so I would like to try his suggestion to do the conversion again.
However, this is not possible because it is already done, seems it does not overwrite things.

Is there an easy way to just remove the tables (and if yes which ones), so I don'thave to do the complete initial setup again? Or is there no other way than doing the initial setup again and after that the conversion again?

I do have a backup of an initial setup, but that's the one momentarily present with my non-testinstall license in the root directory, but that contains a couple of other paths.

[Stuart Silvester]

2 minutes ago, Black Tiger said:

Thank you.

Now I only have to redo the conversion again in the test installation. I'm waiting on an answer to my ticket, but maybe you already know the answer.

I've got 80000 posts which were not converted. However I've seen them being converted and members and topics and post data were selected.

Only things converted were users and passwords and forumtitels, which partly went as category instead of forums. Not even private messages of members, no postings, no calender, nothing else. I've seen the posts conversion passing (took a long time) but nothing went into the database.

This was from an SMF 2.0.15 forum.

Mike thinks there might be made a mistake. I don't think so, but one never knows so I would like to try his suggestion to do the conversion again.
However, this is not possible because it is already done, seems it does not overwrite things.

Is there an easy way to just remove the tables (and if yes which ones), so I don'thave to do the complete initial setup again? Or is there no other way than doing the initial setup again and after that the conversion again?

I do have a backup of an initial setup, but that's the one momentarily present with my non-testinstall license in the root directory, but that contains a couple of other paths.

I have your ticket assigned already to look further into, I'll let you know in the ticket if we need any further information.

[Black Tiger]

Ah I did not know that because it was not mentioned in the ticket.

Then I will wait patiently for the answer and I won't start a test conversion on my final installation.

Thank you!

[Black Tiger]

I'm still just confused a bit I noticed, because on previous moves I always used a 301 redirect.

In the new .htaccess I don't see any 301 mentioned. Since my old forums are on /forum and IPS uses /forums with a trailing "s" in it, don't I need a 301 statement?