Medium to large-scale conversion experiences anyone?

[Firewired]

We've been looking at YaBB SE since it was announced last year because we really need to upgrade our site PinoyDVD because the bandwidth costs of Y1G are killing us since we do about 15 GB worth of traffic a month.

Problem is, our site now has 808 members, 32821 posts, and 2294 topics, and frankly speaking, we're a bit nervous at doing the upgrade. Any first hand experience at converting a board of this size? We've also never worked with MySQL before so this is all new to us.

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide us. I have a running bet with a friend over YaBB SE and phpBB 2. He thinks we should shift, but and I still think that YaBB offers superior usability and features -- especially with the right MODs installed.

[Jeff Lewis]

Hmm, I assume you mean since last year (November 2001) as this was the first time it was evern mentioned

A few of our members have converted forums of that size.  Christian Land converted his and I believe he had 30,000+ messages...

I'll see if I can direct him to you...

[firewired]

Thanks Jeff, and I did mean last November. I corrected myself after I remembered that it's 2002.

What's Christian Land's site?

[dodgy]

I converted mine with no problems 27000 messages, 2120 threads.

[WedgeAntilles250]

The real test is when CafeTropico gets converted over.

Members: 1967  •  Posts: 58987  •  Topics: 3499

[Jeff Lewis]

So give it a shot, let us know how it goes

[WedgeAntilles250]

I don't own CafeTropico, but I am a member.

The owner is thinking about converting over due to the huge demands that YaBB1Gold is putting on his server.  Just too many data files to load.  It it choking the server.

[Jeff Lewis]

Hmm, I'd be interested to see how it goes

[oldford]

I'm also looking at converting the ClassicBroncos.com forums over too. They've really started to bog down lately. Take forever to load up and suck up a ton of bandwidth.

Members: 1010  •  Posts: 20659  •  Topics: 3199

I'm hosted on Xnull so I shouldn't have any problems, right Jeff?

Hey, I thought you left anyway!

[Jeff Lewis]

Left what?  I did leave Xnull, this isn't Xnull  Heck, it isn't even YaBB over at Xnull

As for the converter, should work just fine there unless the server bogs the script down...

[oldford]

Well I did a test forum and the conversion went amazingly well.  

The first install of SE I did had something wrong with it I think, because when I tried to convert I got all sorts of errors and many of my images never got uncompressed into their folders.

Anyway, I started over from scratch with a new database and it worked really well. Only a few tweaks and it would be very similar to my old forum. (just have to figure out how to get the old mods back on there)

New test SE forum
Old Yabb Gold forums

I was a little dissapointed by the speed. It's faster than Yabb Gold, but not as much as I expected. I was expecting it to be as fast as these SE forums, but then I did a host speed check and found out that the www.yabb.info pings take under 1 ms and my host (xnull.com) takes more like 76 ms! Guess that explains it! Any hosting plans over here Jeff?  

Well the upshot is that the install and converter seems to work fine, even for larger Yabb forums. Nice job folks!

[Jeddd]

Well.....I've been struggling with the conversion.  I have 1300 members and 26000 posts on the site.  It converts the memberlist without a hitch.....but crashes with a 500 error about halfway thru the messages.  I have 3 categories setup.....and it doesn't make it thru the first.

Is there a conflict when it automatically generates the "general" news cat......and I also have a cat called "general"?

I would really like to upgrade.....but I'm a little frustrated.

Thanks,
Jeddd

[Jeddd]

I just tried the conversion again and got the 500 error while converting messages.  I checked the error log and get "empty script output" error??  Any ideas?

[Gobalopper]

I had a fairly large board, 3115 threads and 48485 posts, and had only one problem with the converter.

The problem wasn't that the board was too large but that some of my threads had over 1000 posts and php would time out. I ended up having to use another faster server to convert the messages. So perhaps you are having the same sort of problem?

[Ben_S]

If you have problems doing it on your host you could always do it locally then upload the db