After the software shift, will the thread links still be valid, or will links to other threads be borked? I know that some forum software now incorporates the thread title into the link; I don't know if the new software will do that, but it might also use a different numbering system.

 

Also, will the [thread][/thread] tags still work?

There are conversion tools to make old links continue functioning as redirects to the new threads.

 

I'll be adding [thread] tags as custom BBCode so they will redirect correctly.

 

I'll have to verify this all works properly, but ideally it should.

Sweet. Any word on the estimated shift date?

How much downtime should we expect?

 

Also, please don't let dave do it; we all know what happens when dave plays with the server.

I'd guess it'll happen within a week, although there may be unforeseen delays. Conversion takes an hour or two, followed by us frantically changing permission settings, making sure blogs work, and so on.

 

Blogs may be down for longer, actually, as user IDs will change during the conversion and we'll have to update the blog tables so they know who their owners are.

 

dave and I will likely be running the conversion together, so we can get things done faster. We'll have to see if we both have the time.

You and dave, then? I guess that means SFN will be down at least a month. :'(

Never fear. Automated backups! I have no intention of going "whoops, we screwed up, we'll leave it down until tomorrow." We'll go right back to vB if things fail.

What's gonna be lost in the conversion?

 

PMs

Sigs

Friends

Quark, Lepton, Molecule, etc labels

Rep comments

Indent tags*

Smileys

Member Profiles

YouTube embeds

Thread subscriptions

Hide**

mooey's forums

Whatever

 

 

*

like so

**[hide]for example[/hide]

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

Edit to the above: place a question mark after each item on the list.

 

Just basically wanna check in advance, to know what to back up here (for example PMs) and some just plain curiosity.

PMs will be converted but they're unfortunately left in a bit of a mess. IPB uses a "conversations" feature, where you can essentially have a private conversation with several members at once; each PM you sent or received in vB is turned into its own conversation, so your inbox is full of both sent and received PMs. It's messy, but you'll have your PMs.

 

(On second thought, looking at the numbers here, it appears some PMs were lost in the test conversion. Never fear; we'll keep the old site running as a read-only archive for a while for data that may be lost in the conversion.)

 

Indent tags will still work, although there won't be the colored box, just an indent. I may re-style quote and indent tags in IPB to match what we've done here.

 

As for the rest of the list, here are some notes:

 

• Sigs - converted
  
• Friends - converted
  
• User titles - may have to be remade, but I think they're converted
  
• Rep comments - may be lost, although reputation itself will come along. IPB may support reputation comments, I'm not sure, but I haven't seen them.
  
• Smilies - converted
  
• Profiles - converted
  
• YouTube embeds - I'll be adding a custom BBCode in IPB to replicate this, so they should continue to work
  
• Thread subscriptions - not converted. IPB's subscription system is more advanced and configurable; you can even get notifications when someone quotes a post of yours. But it won't carry over subscriptions from vB.
  
• Hide - will be an alias for IPB's own spoiler BBCode
  
• mooey's forums - converted along with the rest
  

 

Things to watch out for:

• Members with special characters in their names ([]&= and such) may have trouble being converted, although I'm hoping IPS can resolve this bug before we convert.
  
• Members with apostrophes in their names (i.e. me) will potentially be unable to log in until I manually fix them. This should be handled by the converter, so I've filed a bug.
  
• Blogs may be broken for a short time after conversion
  

 

I hope I've covered everything.

Perhaps I'll win the game this time.

you mentioned special charcters.

 

will underscores (_) be affected?

I don't think so. Your account seems to have converted just fine.

Just a quick note to say that we encountered a few problems in the test conversion that we need the guys behind IPB to fix, so we're waiting on that at the moment. However we may eventually lost patience and fix them ourselves (if I can figure out how it works ).

However we may eventually lost patience and fix them ourselves (if I can figure out how it works ).

 

As long as you make backups first, you can't screw it up too bad, right?

Ideally.

 

IPS has fixed two of our major bugs and is working on the third. They intend to release an update to the converter packages tomorrow afternoon.

 

I fixed another bug I found in BBCode conversion myself, and submitted a patch.

 

For sanity's sake I'll probably run another test conversion with the new package to make sure it works.