Hello, I'm making the switch from SMF 1.0.7 to vBulletin for my active forum. I installed vbulletin last night. So before I put up the "closed" sign on the SMF forum, I'd like to know what I need to know about Impex. Mostly, I'm curious how this is going to effect my members. I'd like to know what I'm in for so I can take care of my members best. Fore example, I've read that all passwords will be lost with the Impex changeover. That sounds scary! How do I deal with that? I glanced through the manual and didn't see anything that discussed these issues. If I overlooked this part in the manual, just let me know. Thanks, Brandon Drury
Are you sure all passwords wil be lost? I dont know about smf but with phpbb nothing was lost. If you had passworded forums then the passwords were lost but not normal passwords. Anyhow be sure to make a backup of your SMF forum first. Like they say in the installation manual, it is a good idea to do a few test imports first before moving to the actual one so you know exactly what to expect.
Yes all members will have to reset thier passwords The reason being that encription is different in smf and vbulletien. Its no big deal just put up a big announcement saying every member needs to reset thier passowrd.
Leave your source board live until you are sure you have done the import correctly. You really can't go wrong if you keep backups.
Thanks everyone. The conversion went extremely smoothly. The only problem I've had with vBulletin at all has been with displaying latests postsj on my site's homepage. It turns out that I just had to add some tag to the RSS feed. Brandon
Why don't you download your database, set up php, mysql and apache on your own computer, and try to do a test conversion on your own computer and see with what you end up with. That's what I've done when switching to vB from phpBB two years ago and it helped me avoid a lot of problems. Edit: Nevermind; only now I've read your last post.