Converting vbulletin 3.6.7 to MyBB 1.2.12

I am forever changing maxxd.com, but quite recently i havent really done much to it. I was having to piss about with vbulletin’s really over confusing admin system just to make slight changes to stuff, and everything for it costs money.. I wanted a seo mod, and its like as much as the frickin software!

My other forum (SSDB crew!) runs MyBB and has done for over a year, and its the best forum software i have ever had the privilege if using. I have used EVERYTHING at some point or another, and none are as easy to work with, customise and enjoy as MyBB is!

So, after plucking up the courage for weeks and weeks, i planned to shut the vbulletin forums and start moving the stuff over to the new fresh shiny MyBB installation that i had installed onto a subdomain.

I needed to gather the scripts i needed to perform the merge, i got myself the latest version of phpbb installed, and mybb, and installed easyphp onto my computer.

I got a converter for vbulletin 3.6.7 to phpbb2 from here, and did a bit of swatting up on peoples previous attempts to see if they ran into any problems. I installed phpbb onto my local machine, and started downloading the vbulletin database. The mybb merge system was downloaded from the mybb website

Due to the fact the forum was fairly large, and vB stores attachments in the database, the mysql db was huge! The last time i did something like this the most time consuming task was splitting the database down to workable sizes.

As i was installing it on my local machine i was able to copy the db (once it had finished downloading) to a directory on my local machine and edit a config file so that it was available in a drop down box on the file import screen of phpmyadmin. And although at times i thought it had crashed – it finally finished loading and the db was imported successfully.

I then realised that in order for the vB to phpbb merge to work, all the tables needed to be on one db. Ah shit. So i removed the one i had jsut created, and opened the phpbb db. Did the import again, and it worked.

I then ran the phpbb merge script and followed the instructions on it. I noticed that on the first step it claimed to not have picked up the vB tables in the db. But it actually had! I had to adjust the timeout limit in php.ini as a few of the steps (thread and post conversion) timed out.

Once i had finished, i removed the old vb tables, and removed the mer4ge script so all i had was my forum in phpbb format. I then exported the db from my local machine to a sql file on my desktop. It hadn’t copied the forum permissions, usergroups or attachments, but i wasnt bothered. The lack of attachments meant the db was TINY in comparison.

I then imported the db to my webhost, and started the mybb merge system. I have to say that their merge system is much better than the one i used a few steps ago, much more stable and professional. It didnt take that long to complete apart from the post and thread parts. As i had chosen to only do 200 per page, and there was over 30,000!

After it finished, i was left with all my forums, users, posts, polls and threads. No attachments or PM’s but that was a small price to pay to now be running the best forum software available. One thing i had to do was go into the admin panel and go to the recount & rebuild section in order to rebuild the “Last post” bits on threads and the forum index.

After a day of re-doing the groups and making it look pretty it was done. I have been slowly adding plugins to make ti better, so far i have the latest attachment gallery, the warning system and the SEO plugin. I had the image resizer oen too but it was messing up large images, saying something about hotlinking not allowed. I turned it off and the images work fine now!?

Anyway, i thought i would share this with the world, to maybe try and persuade a few other people to move away from vbulletin to a much better piece of kit. MyBB 🙂