Update:

This migration is moving along. @Scrutinizer has been a great help with debugging the bbcode migration, writing Ruby methods to preprocess various bbcode situations which arise in the conversion to markdown.

For examples:

There was some newlines being added to code blocks, so we added some post-processing REGEX search and replace to tidy these up. This was a purely cosmetic change but @Scrutinizer is more annoyed by these cosmetic details than me, and so he wrote some Ruby code to fix it. We are very fortunately to have @Scrutinizer working with me on this.

The same is true for some "bbcode abuse" where in the past over the years, some people copy-and-pasted some bbcode into the forum or others just loved bbcode so much the embedded bbcode everywhere, sometimes nesting bbcode is strange ways. We have also slayed most of those dragons.

We are getting very close. We cannot promise 100% of every possible combination of bbcode-mangles in the vB3 forum will be perfect, but it will be very good, a few orders of magnitude from the initial release, hands down.

Currently I am rebaking all the post again on the staging server. That is a process which takes 12 to 14 hours. For those who may not be familiar with this, here is a short summary:

The vB3 forum (indeed most, if not all, LAMP-based forums) process(es) the pagetext in the database on the fly (when the page is summoned by the client, e.g. the web browser).

However, Discourse stores the pagetext as "raw" and then it cooks the raw into HTML to be rendered. This of course makes the site faster since the code is already rendered and stored in the DB "cooked".

The downside to this, of course, is that it takes longer to "cook all this" during migration testing (reprocessing the raw for bbcode mangling); but lucky for us, after migration is done, it's done.

BTW, this is the same way I serve our forumman pages. Man pages are also cooked and the cooked pages are stored in the DB to make them render faster, so this technique is nothing new.

OBTW, those man pages will stay here in the legacy vB3 forums; until we decide if and/or when to write a plugin to port these to discourse.

That's it for now.