Craftsmanship in Wood

Update: Brian and I just chatted on the phone.

Background:

There's not yet any direct migration from phpBB to WPforo. A two-step process is possible, from phpBB to bbPress to WPforo, but it's uncertain how well that will work. In particular, some important forum post images are hosted directly on the site (esp. in Chris Hall's posts). The simpler migration tools only deal with thread/post text content, but not the forum-hosted media files. Two jumps just means more chances for stuff to go wrong.

I have some work items:

1. Dig into the setup requirements and likely quality of the two-step migration process. Are there any reports of success using this migration path, or is it only a theoretical option?
2. Identify alternate standalone forum software with a good phpBB migration story. I already have candidates from earlier research; this will be a slightly more in-depth triage round. (Just how good is the phpBB migration? What's site administration like? Any good/bad/missing forum features? etc.)
3. Work out what hosting would cost for #2.

Once I've done the above, Brian and I will confab and we'll work out a bit of who-owns-what re: taking over the domain registration, migration, handling hosting, etc. I expect the proverbial chips to fall there largely based on whether a WPforo migration looks viable.

I’ve done some more footwork. I’m pretty skeptical that a migration will go smoothly from phpBB to bbPress to wpforo. I’m finding just one report of someone having taken this path, with only a “lot of cleanup to do” report after the phpBB to bbPress step, and no further updates after. It’s probably doable for someone with dev skills (i.e. me), but I have no idea how much of a timesink it’d become. We’d have to really want wpforo to go this route.

There are two or three other alternatives that are well-supported enough to be reasonable. My next step is to pick two, run their respective migration scripts on local instances, and kick the tires a bit. It’s hard to judge these forum UIs and their ease of setup & maintenance without just running ‘em. At least one of these migration scripts can migrate attachments. Another one does create redirection maps, preserving old topic/post URLs. Using the migration scripts in anger and judging the ease and quality of results seems to be the safest approach. I should be able to share test URLs for these once they’re ready.

I won’t be able to get to this until Wednesday or later this week due to other commitments. Chris, I‘ll need to coordinate with you for forum access, since the importer scripts generally want to connect to the old forum’s database, etc.

Hi John,

I'm paying close attention of course, just want to say thank you for your efforts!

Brian,

if you don't mind, could you pass the bluehost forum admin user name and password onto John?

All set!

Bluehost is sending me ICANN 'Abuse' Reports for the forum

Thank you, gents, for all your time and efforts to transition and continue the forum. This lurker greatly appreciates your hard work.

Jon

Quick update: I've investigated and discarded one of the options (NodeBB), primarily because of some particulars of its database support requirements. Unfortunately, that was the one that had a script to do legacy URL remapping, so links are likely to break.

I'm currently digging into the second option, Discourse. If that doesn't work out, or takes too long, then I'll fall back to preserving the phpBB site entirely as-is and move forward from there.

I've reached out to Chris separately to get the domain name transfer rolling.