What is on Your Mind?

Hmmm. That vbulletin-bbcode plug did not help:

Well, over at meta discourse, they have been "kinda bullying me" to upgrade vB3 to vB4, but when I started the discussion over there with the fact it is a non-starter.

First, they told me to migrate to vB4; then they told me the would help us upgrade to vB3 and we would all work together, then they backtracked and closed the discussion.

I guess when you have forum which has been around for over 15 years and helped upwards of 600 million unique users, this is the payback

What is the old saying "No good deed goes unpunished".

LOL

Even thought there is no upgrade path to get vB4 (and has not been for some time). See control panel:



It's obvious we cannot buy vB4 updates... and it's obvious that Discourse it not going to help with vB3. They have made this clear by kinda bulling me over there, advising strongly we upgrade to an upgrade which does not exist for us.

LOL

So, as I thought before. I will have to do this all my myself; but at least we have a starting point vbulletin.rb script I can modify.

Let's THANK Discourse for that. and THANK them for Discourse.

I understand these folks at Discourse. Dealing with vB forums are a pain (especially vB3) and not fun at all. I know, I have owned one for over 15 years

The bottom line is that Discourse does not support vB3 migration to Discourse, they have made that very clear over the past few days.

(and it is perfectly OK they don't.... I understand their viewpoint, but they do not understand vB versions, licensing.... and make recommendations which are impossible to follow... sadly)

In a nutshell, it all boils down to Discourse does not support vB3 migration, period.

This is interesting... just saw this in the vB control panel... we started running vB 20 years ago.

Update:

In a docker container app, it is painfully slow to update the raw posts in the postgres DB.

So, as an experiment, i spent a few hours and changed about 10 BBCODE tags using search and replace in the raw posts. Each time took at least 30 minutes.

Now, I'm rebaking the posts to see if the changes I made on the raw posts will show up in the cooked version after rebaking.

Code:

root@localhost-app:/var/www/discourse# rake posts:rebake
Rebaking post markdown for 'default'

Hi Neo,

I assume nobody ever will do a migration/upgrade of a software like the vBulletin used at unix.com for a fixed price. That's beause I assume vBulletin here is absolutely heavily customized, to get really advanced and unique features, so the chances that the upgrade scripts will fail are very high. But I'm not sure for that.

That's the cost of customizations:
So maybe to just customize the vb-importer of discourse is the best way to go. But hey - if someone says he/she can upgrade the current installation for a relatively small price, why not give a try....

Very slooooooooow:

Code:

Rebaking post markdown for 'default'
     1597 / 1059651 (  0.2%)

I think at least 10 to 15 hours to rebake these 1M+ posts....

No one can help us (for a reasonable price with top results)....... it is best I do it myself....

and if I pay someone to help, they will encounter the same issues... and it will just be a bigger mess that it is now...

This I am sure 1000%.

I have a lot of experience hiring "experts" and almost every time, it is a waste of both time and money and the end product is far from perfect. I always end up teaching the "experts" how to do the job I am paying them to do, every time.

Let me worry about these things, I'm not seeking advise on approach (but thanks anyway) ..... The work is work and it takes hard work to do it. Don't discount my hard expert work as if someone else can "cheaply do it".

I assure you that is not the case. Yes, it can be done, but it will look bad. I am working on very small details all not covered by any "migration script".



Thanks.

PS: How many vB3 to Discourse migrations in a Docker container running Discourse have you done so far?