Recovered Asylum, research facility & training facility

[Hells Warrrior]

So as you all know by now we have recovered the old asylum, research & training facility. Unfortunately the usernames all have the prefix of guest_ and the suffix of _* - so I have done a fair bit of working and testing on this before bring it onto the live site and since it was brought over to the live site.

 

Changing the guest_username_* to just the username - it's too big a task to align, it will take a lot of work on a per post/user basis and it is simply not going to happen. So what we have done is removed the guest_ prefix and the _* suffix so that the members name is displayed, it will still show the name as a "guest" name, in that you cannot select it, however if you copy the name and search it in the member database you will be able to see more info about the poster if need be.

 

I'm sorry that it's come to this, I really wanted to marry them all up correctly but the task is massive and would take too long to implement and no guarantee of it working. So we are leaving it as is, the main thing is we have the "lost" forums back here and don't need to switch between here and vBulletin.

 

On another note, the vBulletin forum directory is no more and the phpbb directory are no more. The databases still exist but the directories have been removed.

[Boom115]

Huge task just getting it moved. Thanks for putting all the time and effort into getting it recovered and available for us to read. You definitely busted your arse getting this one done and we all appreciate it!

[Rissole25]

So is there any chance to maybe edit/reformat those posts or is it a no go? No worries if it's not possible.

[Hells Warrrior]

They can be edited and reformatted, if you want/need to reformat any of your posts just let us know and we can allow this to happen. If any other posts need edited/reformatted just let us know and we can do the others.

[AlphaSnake]

Excellent work, I thought it was lost forever.

 

Seriously awesome work.

 

Regards Alpha.

[Tac]

Much appreciated, thank you guys very very much.

[Hells Warrrior]

I'm currently attempting an alternative way of converting the data from vBulletin to IPB forum software.

 

When we previously did this, we had already converted from PHPBB to IPB and then converted vBulletin info over to IPB. This caused the issue of guest usernames on the vBulletin recovered information, it's not an easy task to basically convert two forum software details into one forum system (especially an active one). So What I'm currently attempting on a test enviroment, is a fresh install of IPB forum software (what we are using now) and converting the vBulletin information over.

 

This will work flawlessly, what I'm then going to do, is converge (merge) the current forum (database copy, not the live site) into the converted vBulletin / IPB forum. What this should do (in theory) is merge everything that is similar. I have already started and I' currently convering over 200k posts, it's almost done and then I'll be able to import the copy of the current database and see if it merges correctly.

 

I'll let you all know how it goes.