The Mana World Forums

Hello tmw/evol community

This thread is to offer potential ways to merge our two existing phpbb3 forums.
evol and tmw.

A working method to merging multiple phpbb3 forums.

A conversion to mybb was the fastest and most streamlined available method .
The only loss of content observed was weblinks had extra HTML formatting in posts.
Failing this method , we face many hours of development and testing to create the merge script.
Not impossible but a little impractical. I can elaborate on this if needed.
Moving on to the how , Having addressed the why .


My testing environment consisted of:
ubuntu (recent ish)
mysql most recent
apache2 (with php of course) most recent
phpbb3 3.0.14
mybb 1.8.07
nothing special ,does not require ubuntu or apache2 specifically



This method requires live copies of the forums to be merged , not backups files.
reproduce them for testing as you will... does not write to original forum dbs

Find mybb 1.8.07 and its merge utility here
https://resources.mybb.com/downloads/mybb_1807.zip
https://resources.mybb.com/downloads/merge_1807.zip


setup is like phpbb3
Setup:
Create a mysql database and user for mybb.
Install mybb to webroot.
Copy the merge folder to mybbs root folder.
Copy loginconvert.php from merge folder to /mybb/inc/plugins
Access mybb via web (sitename/mybb or wherever).
follow instructions for install. (it will tell you if something needs perms changed).
After install rename/delete or move the install directory from mybbs root folder.

Operation:
Acess mybb via web again and append /merge (sitename/mybb/merge).
it will handle one forum at a time.
Feed it phpbb3 db info and run the scripts. .
If all goes smooth hit cleanup and check the forum. (sitename/mybb)
Repeat for the second phpbb3 (accessing sitename/mybb/merge again)




Bug and fix:
Avatars and attachments may be problematic . if this happens here is a simple fix.
avatars and attachments for phpbb3 stored at these locations.
(attachments) phpbb3/files
(avatars) phpbb3/images/avatar/upload
Place avatars and attachments from phpbb3 folders into two web assessable folders and use those locations




if i have missed a major step let me know and i will correct it.
Contact me inworld via skellington or error . or onthe official irc channels .
if needed.

I will continue to seek alternate methods. and post them here

What happens if there are two accounts with the same username? or emailaddress? attachments with the same filename? Not to mention that weblinks linking to another thread problably all will be broken?

uncertain about links internally inside the forum but yes this is why this method was chosen . because it removes alot of the issue with duplicate ids and such. the one instance i observed of a duplicate username . the system appended "import_from_phpbb3 to the username and continued

Rein wrote:uncertain about links internally inside the forum but yes this is why this method was chosen . because it removes alot of the issue with duplicate ids and such. the one instance i observed of a duplicate username . the system appended "import_from_phpbb3 to the username and continued

I believe we can merge them manually on the admin interface.

I can't help but wonder if this is truly necessary given the amount of work it would take. The Evol forums have very few posts compared to TMW. If we only count posts we might want to keep, it's really just a handful. Maybe we should just give them up? We can manually repost the most important things. I have already done so with some posts I made about forum rules.

WildX wrote:I can't help but wonder if this is truly necessary given the amount of work it would take. The Evol forums have very few posts compared to TMW. If we only count posts we might want to keep, it's really just a handful. Maybe we should just give them up? We can manually repost the most important things. I have already done so with some posts I made about forum rules.

I agree. Merging is a lot of work, and there are always things that causes problems. Another alternative is to migrate the Evol forum to a TMW subdomain, and just letting the forum/database run in a read-only mode. This makes sure that the forum is accessible in the (faraway) future, yet skips all the hard work that is required to merge the two forums. Downside is that the forum software still needs to be kept up to date though.

The art section of Evol has been active over these last years, it would be bad to loose these thread.

as previous solution is not perfect .(altho there is a second process by witch it can be made back to phpbb3 )
i do agree . it is not OUR solution . just A solution.
i am working on a direct merge script.
found a set of instructions waiting to be scripted.

with the completed merge of our two forums , i feel compelled to share the script used.
below is a script for merging two phpbb3 forums .

https://gitlab.com/evol/evol-tools/blob ... m-merge.py


its dirty , its ugly ...and it works! lol