I often hear Americans say how terrifying German sounds, no matter the words

Quote from Throwholics

Haha Alright
wierd that it doesnt show.

Not so weird, with how it does the job, and the setup I have for PHP and MySQL connections; the rather long running (on this particular forum) processes it uses to calculate that information will likely never have the opportunity to finish. The number of threads and number of users are also off, but by far less (+-5% under)

Quote from Throwholics

Are you already testing with the WBB 4.1 version or waiting for the WBB 5.0 ? (Which makes more sense I suppose money wise)

I'm already testing with 4.1. I wasn't aware 5 was coming out super soon when I purchased, but I would have gone with 4.1 even if I had to give 5 a little extra time to get all the possible kinks worked out. I'm very happy with Burning Board thus far (functionality, ease of plugin creation, community, support, etc etc) and I will feel zero regret when I purchase my 5.X upgrade in whatever number of months.

Quote from D3nnis3n

German is fun. By the way, I can pronounce "squirrel" correctly, but even though i got a C1 english certificate some years ago i'm still not able to pronounce "th" correctly. Seriously, i just can't. I avoid it whenever possible. For example I never use numbers containing "three" in english.

If I ever decide to learn German, I'll be coming at you. I seriously should learn a second language; life's too short to spend it doing everything alone.

Quote from Throwholics

Did not know this would be an issue. Maybe Alexander or Tim would know something how to fix that.

I was referring to SMF. I'm hoping the problem doesn't exist in Burning Board, but we'll definitely find out.

Quote from Throwholics

Maybe just to make a trial run, import it and let it calculate
To see if it shows the correct amount of posts etc.

I've done one trial run which found a number of errors in the existing data set (which I've since fixed) that caused some duplicate this and some missing that. Sadly, just importing the database will take a weekish (and that's after a pretty solid reduction in the most difficult parts of the import), which is why I need to finish up the "continuously updating" custom SMF exporter I've started. I have most of it; now I need to write some SQL triggers to store non-addition modifications to the database while the existing import is going. I hope to wrap it up this weekend, but I have some more plugins to make before I can transition my community, so it's pretty likely I won't be able to wrap up the importer. D:

Quote from Throwholics

Jesus christ jsut for the beta of WBB5 ive done the import in minutes couple of times today But i guess 80 Milllion posts haha yeah well takes simply time

Indeed. The posts, the "Personal Messages" (which take *forever* to get converted to "Conversations"), the users, the topics, it all takes an eternity and then one more day.

Quote from Throwholics

Does not woltlab has an SMF importer?

Yes, but in order for me to use that one as is, I'd have to, more or less, take my forum offline for the duration of the import. Unfortunately, I just can't do that, based on the long import time. The exporter I've started extends the existing SMF exporter and uses most of its functionality.

Quote from Throwholics

What kind of plugins?

- I wrote one that allows the users to style a section of their post with a BBCode using specific CSS (certain things are restricted or not allowed for obvious, layout breaking reasons).
- I'm currently most of the way through writing a plugin that allows "Post Templates", which really just allows a user to store some text and easily insert it into their post wherever they wish.
- I couldn't find a way or a plugin to allow a user to censor specific words for only themselves, so I may make a plugin that does such (should be easy enough, if one doesn't already exist).
- On FeralFront members can currently style their names with colors, and I couldn't find this either, so I'm considering making a plugin for it, though I don't think it's worth the trouble.
- Members can currently create "badges" and hand them out to one another; kinda like the awards system plugin, but for each individual user. This, unfortunately, is rather popular, so I'll probably have to do something about it.

Some other functionalities exist on my current forum, but I'm not considering creating equivalents on Burning Board due to the time investment vs how much I loath those functions.

Quote from Morik

have you took a look to this:

That is, indeed, pretty close. It likely would have been a reasonable replacement had I found it before I'd nearly finished with the slightly different thing I made. XD Making it was a great experience anyhow; I learned a ton about how plugin creation works in WCF.

EDIT: Looking more at it, it doesn't appear to work quite the same. The extra manual copy/paste step after selecting the "notes" part when making a post is key, as is what appears to be a lack of "preview" when creating the note. While these things aren't important when considering that particular plugins purpose, they're 2 very key aspects of the functionality for my members.

Quote from Throwholics

Understandably, but isnt there a faster way?

From my previous conversation with Tim, it doesn't sound like it.

That's sort of the idea that I wound up going with after discussion with Tim. My particular forum is hosted on AWS so I can easily spin up a replica DB, which is good because exporting from my live database would probably will murder the forum.
So, the steps as they exist:
1 ) Spin up a replica server and wait for it to be current
2 ) Insert triggers on primary database to store update/delete queries for later application to new Burning Board site
2 ) Immediately cut replica server off from the main to make sure everything stays consistent in the database during import (otherwise users might get imported one day, and then posts might get imported the next day that belong to a user that joined after the users were imported, which will break the import)
3 ) Do the LOOOOONG import
4 ) Rehookup the replica server to the main server and let them get synced
5 ) Pput the forum into maintenance mode to avoid any changes to the dataset
6 ) Run importer again, but only grab the information new in the last week (or whatever time), which should take a relatively small amount of time
7 ) Run update/delete queries that have been stored up
8 ) Return the site to normal operation

One of the biggest things I *must* avoid is the rekeying that can come with a thread import if anything goes a little hinky. The age of the forum means that it has a whole boatload of "link juice" here and there and everywhere. I need to be able to properly 301 the URLs or it'll severely hurt the already hurting forum.

Quote from Morik

That way at least your old internal urls could be replaced so that they don't need to get rewritten thru the webserver:

It's not my internal URLs I'm worried about, it's all the links that come in from other sites, and anything Google has stored. According to Google, we currently have a whole boatload of pages (threads/posts) that are old and well established. If all the URLs change without any way to redirect the existing URLs to the new, not only are all the URLs in my database that users have used to link to other threads broken, all the URLs from other sites are broken, and all the link juice Google has associated with my forum has the potential to be lost. With the regular expression to catch external links and Google SEO coming in, it'll also catch all those URLs that are internal to the website "for free". While a regex rewrite isn't the best thing in the world, it won't effect my particular server performance in a measurable way, and it's better than the alternative of having internal and external incoming links broken, and Google thinking I've lost all my old content and gained a bunch of new content. With the tricky nature of SEO, I'm not sure how this would shake out, but probably not for the best, and I don't really want to find out.

Quote from Morik

it was just meant as an additional change to get the new urls propper recognised so they show always the title of the thread

I get what you mean now. Definitely a usability improvement, considering the number of URLs I'm sure to have.

Quote from Morik

Maybe @Andrea Berg is able to help you out with them, she also has postet some for vBulletin...

Like you mentioned, the rules shouldn't be too hard. If I have any trouble, though, I know who to hit up.