Well, I've had to switch hosts because of some horrible reliability and service, so I figured it would be a good time to upgrade  the Eblah, considering I've been running 8.1 for 3 or so years (without a hitch, might I add).  But now comes the difficulty.  I have 3 or so years of members and boards that I'd like to transfer over.  I installed the new version of eblah on my new host, and I was hoping that I'd be able to copy the contents of "members," "boards," and "messages" over and it'd all work A-OK.  It doesn't.  So, here I am.  

Is this possible?  To transfer the boards, messages, and members over from 8.1 to 10.35?  Or should I just tell everyone that we need to start again from scratch?

Thanks in advance.

Sean

This would not be a straight forward procedure as there have been too many changes. This applies to the code and the template system.  It can be done but you would have to install in stages so the setup converts the files to the correct version. 8.1 to 9.7 then 10.1 and then to the latest so it depends on how much you want to keep the old data.

Thanks Martin,

I went ahead and installed 8.1 on my new host and copied the member, boards, and messages over and it all seemed to work great.  So, I figured I'd try what you said and install 9.7, then go to 10.1, ect.  Well, I downloaded 9.7, but I cannot find any instructions on what files to copy and what ones to leave alone.  I tried figuring this out from the 8.1 documentation, but it didn't work.  I got Setup.pl to work and it said it converted my forum, but when I went to it, I get a "template not found" message with a insert "blah v=$copyright" in your template error.  I manually opened settings.pl and it appears the url and dir for templates is fine.  The files are there.  I can view the template.html and see that the copyright code is there.

Anyway, I'm stuck unless I can get the install documentation for 9.7 so I know I'm doing it correctly.  Any suggestions?  I could just live with 8.1 on my new host, but it'd be nice to use the newer versions since they have so much more.

Sean

Do you have a backup?

If you want me to sort I don't mind, just pm ftp details.

Thanks for the offer.  I actually got it figured out on my own  

I did what you said and installed 8.1 on my new host.  Then I installed 9.7 on the new host, but in it's new home "forum."  Before I started the "Setup.pl," I transfered over my members, boards, and messages folders from 8.1 into the 9.7.  Then I ran Setup.pl and had it rebuild the forum.  It worked great.  Then I installed the latest version and followed the great instructions on the site.  It's up an running on my "test" site.  So now I have to make the big move of switching my last site (smbatrails.com) from the crappy freeservers host to bluehost, and I can hopefully copy the board from the test site to my official site and make the appropriate changes.  Ah!  What a mess.  But if nothing else, it's forcing me to upgrade the forum.  Justin, I'm sending you a donation, because we've had too much fun with the forum for you not to get something!

Thanks again for offering to help me with this.  

Sean

Thanks for the donation, it's much appreciated.  

I'm glad you figured the problem out.  I believe you can convert from 8.1 directly to 10.3.5, though you do need to make sure you rebuild the members list and boards after the upgrade or else you are bound to have issues with posting and member logins.  Make sure, before you go live, that all the members .dat files have been converted from usernames to userids.  If they do not that's usually a CHMOD issue and can cause larger problems in the future.