I've been working most of the night pushing out the new converters for E-Blah. ?So far I've got YaBB 2, and I'm talking with a few people to try to get a converter for more forums, such as phpBB. ?Right now this is just in early testing stages, so it needs testing to see that everything works. ?Not everything is converted (as there are diffrences in the systems), but as of right now the following is Converted:

- Members (including PMs)
- Messages
- Boards and Categories
- Member Groups (only groups a member is a part of)

Reasons to convert can be found here.

I need someone to test this converter to make sure everything works fine on it. ?To install simply upload Convert.pl and the *.cdb files to the directory where E-Blah will be installed. ?CHOMD Convert.pl 755. Next, run Convert.pl. ?The converter will walk you through the two steps and then you're forum will be converted. ?Nothing is deleted from the YaBB installation. ?Before running the converter E-Blah must be installed (ONLY installed, do not post messages, add members, etc -- they can, and WILL be written over).

DO NOT CONVERT ON TOP OF A CURRENT E-Blah INSTALLATION.

After you've converted report the results back to here. ?Remember this is for YaBB 2.0 Pre-Release -> E-Blah Platinum 9. ?I claim no responsibility for problems you have. ?If it wipes your server, that's your fault. ?I've tested it several times and it appeared to work fine. ?It's being released under the GPL, which can be found:

http://www.eblah.com/license.php

DO NOT download unless you agree to the terms specified in this license agreement.

Way to go Justin  Pity I don't have a YaBB board to try and convert  No point in converting an empty board eh ?

I'd try to help with php, but most forum systems I know use MYSQL, and I'm still in the flat-file stage.  

Check this thread or the downloads page for more download links.

If anyone wants to write a good detailed documentation let me know.  

Hi! I'm struggling with the phpBB converter... once it gets to http://dan.funchat-forums.co.uk/cgi-bin/forum/Convert.pl?convert=phpBB_2-0-17,step=2 page it comes up with page cannot be displayed error and the server log states that the script terminated unexpectedly... any ideas what i'm doing wrong?

PS I've tried playing with CHMOD settings etc... if I put the WRONG password into the box it goes to an error page, but putting the RIGHT password comes up with the error 500 page.. the phpBB board i'm trying to convert from has 100000+ posts and 400+ members... the SQL database is over 200MB in size are any of these factors? also is there a way to get it to convert from the SQL backup file instead!


[Thu Apr 20 22:24:31 2006] [error] [client 82.3.32.73] Premature end of script headers: /home/fhlinux198/d/dan.funchat-forums.co.uk/user/htdocs/cgi-bin/forum/Convert.pl is the error message in the server log

The post counts is the issue.  The converter is doing a LOT of work, and so it times out and the server closes the connection.  This is GOOD at times, but for converting large forums -- very bad.  Do you have physical server access (like where you can change the configuration)?  If you do, you can change the timeout time to something really high so it can convert.  If you have SSH access I MIGHT could convert it for you (but it could be time consuming).

Hi Justin, thanks for the quick reply! Unfortunately I dont have access to the server as its a shared server.

what if i deleted half of the forum, converted it and then restored from the sql backup and then deleted the other half?

That wouldn't work because the converter doesn't append the files, it writes over the old ones.

Hmm.

The best way would probably be to move to a non-shared server.    I could converter it with my closet server (maybe), but it'd be a pain to get to your server (take all day to transfer file by file ... gzipping could fail if it's too large, etc).  

thanks.... I'll try and see if I can persuade the server owner to change the timeout time first as they might do it as a one off which would solve my problem

The timeout for something this big would have to be changed to possibly 15 minutes (or even longer).  It's huge.

Hello.  Glad to have found E-Blah software and this forum.

I run a fairly new Sopranos discussion forum at EZboard.com (software and hosting services in one package). The ezboard software leaves much to be desired, and the prices for maintaining a forum with features like sticky topics and chat will be prohibitively expensive at next renewal because the forum is getting a LOT of traffic.

I would like to switch the forum to different, much more powerful software on a 3rd party server and use my own domain name.  phpBB2 was highly recommended, and one feature I was told it had was a software script that would convert posts from the existing EZboard forum to the new, phpBB2 based forum with poster/author names and thread structures in tact.  I was just about to settle on using that software when I discovered that it won't apparently allow me to move individual posts from one thread to another, pre-existing thread.

The software I choose must have that ability.  And it must also be capable of assimilating a backlog of posts on the existing ezboard and transferring them to the new forum, in tact.  Can E-Blah do both of these things for me?  And if it can't directly transfer the posts from the old forum, can I do a two-tiered transfer -- first to phpBB2 or some other intermediate format -- and then to E-Blah?

E-Blah can merge posts to threads and also split posts.

You can transfer your forum to phpBB2, then convert it to E-Blah (a converter is on the downloads page).

If you have any problems, just let us know.  

I am trying to convert my yabb2 boards, messages and members over but I get an error "Convert cannot find boards directory." I CHMOD the Convert.pl to 755 and also uploaded the YaBB_2.cdb. What am I doing wrong.

Make sure you specified the correct directory to the boards directory.

Also, make sure you are using the latest version of YaBB (not a beta version).  I hope this helps.  If not, I may be able to look into it for you.