UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads Installation and Upgrade Support *GULP* Making the Plunge

With my work schedule and what-not, I haven't converted by old Classic board to Threads ... but plan to do so tonight.

I am WAY nervous about this! LOL

My biggest concern is starting it up. I have my test threads board; I don't want to get it mixed up with my conversion to the main board.

Any advice/guidance would be greatly appreciated!

~Sue
adwoff.com

Does your site run on Windows or Linux?

#1 MAKE A BACKUP

Read about the redirector scripts (even posted about them today for someone).

I'm not sure. I'm thinking Windows, but how would I know for sure?

---

As it is, my back-up of my members' files is taking way too long, so I'm going to post-pone my conversion until tomorrow.

~Sue
adwoff.com

My sue is upgrading!! hehe...

EAsy, backup your old .c, install the .t forum to the "add admin user" screen, then run your importer. once th eimport is done then take and login, setup the redirect scripts that come with the .c importer and you're set to customize...

As always, we're always here and at ubbdev to help yas ...

And it's more likely you're on a unix/linux host than windows now adays, but it can vary but doesn't have much impact..

True, not much difference when you're only able to get to some control panel and have no control over PHP or MySQL.

Actually, she should run thru the import once before closing down the old boards (make sure there are no tech issues); then set up her styles as she wants them and save/export them (so not to shock her members); then have her members check out the "new" site as a beta, taking in suggestions (so they feel 'a part of it' at least); THEN after all that: close the old forum, wipe the database and re-import everything... then import the styles, and test it (by yourself first).

Then in the old forums (while it's still closed), go and change all the forums to read-only, add a prominent header saying you've moved w/ the new link (see my 'old' link in my sig) -- and then you can reopen the Classic forum -- and then make the new Threads forums live.

Wait a while to redirect the old links; it's not necessary for now (IMHO) if you set a "We Moved!" link on the old forum, and told your members of the new forums/address well in advance (like you should).

The old links will work for months/years, there's no rush.

Before activating the redirects (which I haven't even done yet, and I switched 2 months ago!), I'd wait 'til the new site was indexed by Google & Yahoo first. Mine was after a week or so. In a few weeks probably I'll install the redirects... or whenever my long-time members feel they can let go of the original...

At the very least, I'd wait a until the search engines found the new URLs before redirecting...

Does it crash a lot?

J/K!

BTW jgeoff, the importers where created initially for incoming search engines to "get ahead" at indexing the new site (hence why it also posts a redirect header).

Linux, Sue. Netcraft's report 14 dec 2006

OS Server Last changed IP address Netblock Owner
Linux Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) 14-Dec-2006 63.99.108.181 Point & Click Consul

Our favorite Sue is upgrading. Yay! \o/

You guys are just too damn cute!

I have the forums backed-up and the members' files backed-up; do I need to back-up more?!

~Sue
adwoff.com

You should backup all of the old software:
/cgidir (cgi directory, contains most of your board code)
/membersdir (member directory, contains, member data/pms)
/ubb (contains your forum data and the rest of the ubb script, including all of the noncgi files)

Why thank you!

Quick question if anyone is out there in the wee hours!

Is the absolute path for this


same as it is for


Also, absolute path means full URL, correct? Or is it adwoff.com/ + name of directory?

If someone could give me an answer on this ASAP, it'd be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

~Sue
adwoff.com

NonCGIURL... URL would imply http://blahblah...
NonCGI Directory... would imply as below:

The absolute path would be from the SERVER level, not a URL...
It'd be like... /partition/accountname/public_html/threads usually...

Thank you!

For the UBB.classic™ NonCGIURL: I put in the full URL, correct?

~Sue
adwoff.com

Gotcha! Thank you so much!

Let us know if it works or not - hopefully I'm still "cute" at least! LOL

lol sue, don't go around breaking things ...

Always!


Well, I have a couple of funky things happening.

The members all transferred over, but some of the numbers are skewed.

For example: I *was* #1 at the Classic board, now I'm #2.

And Nora, the reason for our board, was 22, now she's 21.

But I noticed that the avatars came over, so I'm very, very happy w/that! (See, it's the little things )

---

The problem I'm seeing now is that the script *stops* with bringing over the events.

If I refresh the page, it'll bring over a couple more, but damn, that's getting pretty old!

I also don't have my forums yet ... so I guess the process is stuck @ the importing of events.

Any suggestions on how to move things along?!

ETA: Now nothing is coming over ... and I'm stuck w/the importing of events ... HELP!

~Sue
adwoff.com

ETA: It's almost 5 A.M. EST ... gonna take a short nap! Hopefully someone will have an answer(s) for me when I get back!

user #1 is "guest", user #2 will be the first "old" user. This is as expected.

Any deleted users left "gaps", so if you had say:
nora 21
nick 22
joe 23
john 24

IF you deleted at anytime 22 and 23, then from your import user 24 (who is the user after 21) will become user 22.

again, expected and intended behavior.

IT's odd that it's stopping like that, is your host by chance killing the apache process from your import? this could cause that, as the import can be semi hard on the server.

Ah, crap. Let me fire off an e-mail to them and explain what's going on.

I guess I figured doing it in the dead of the night, I'd avoid these issues. *sigh*

~Sue
adwoff.com

I let my webhost know about my import and they had someone watching the server at 4:30 on a Sunday morning. It was a brand new server that they wanted to see abused. I think we got the load up to a 4 or a 5.

In hindsight, I should've done this, too.

I'm still waiting for California to WAKE UP so I can get this issue addressed!

~Sue
adwoff.com

Good luck! I'm looking forward to see what you have when you get it going live.

I think a lot of people are waiting for the state of California to "wake up."

Yeh, power is spotty all over the pacific states lol... coarse, a lot of them buy power from OR and we're having outages everywhere, so its not a big suprise.

The power company atm will only accept calls for outages; I can't even pay my bill, i got yelled at by a representative when i called in this morning lol

LOL -- walked into that one, didn't I?

This is the response I received from my host company about 4 hours ago ...


... I don't really know what this means!

Do the import in smaller batches? Well,

1. what happens if I'm in the middle of the import?
   
2. can one start this over? AND
   
3. IF one can start it over, HOW does one do the import in "smaller batches"?

See my dilemma?

So, those of you in the know, what the heck do I do next?

I have to go to work in just a little bit--leaving everything in limbo--I should be able to work on it tomorrow, but if I'm still in this limbo, I obviously cannot do any work on it.

ARGH!

Sue
adwoff.com

Ah, while I was typing my previous message, this is what my host company sent me:


So, now what?

Rick? You out there?! Come on ... you don't have a life, right?

~Sue
adwoff.com

He also probably has no electricity.

The good news about this, Sue, is that if for some reason it dies in the middle and your run out of time you can just leave the older UBB running. The import doesn't touch it. Then when you have time to run it again you can delete the .threads database completely and start over again.

In fact, that's what I'd do. Drop the database, delete the beta install, install a clean and new installation, then do the import from there. Who knows what other problems you might run into by trying to upgrade that older beta. You've hit it once, what else might happen? Long term you'll probably have fewer frustrations if you delete that beta and go from scratch.

David~

Thanks for the advice.

I'm actually trying to convert from my UBB.classic 6.7 board to Threads 7.02

This is where it ended up when the process got hung up:


---

If I abandon what has happened so far and start over, I think I may run into the same situation I'm in right now--unless the import batches can be done in smaller groupings (according to what my host company says).

~Sue
adwoff.com

If you have many many many users that have filled out their birthday this step might be causing some problems. While I haven't run into it personally in all the imports I've done, you might just have a lot of birthdays and it's timing out on entering them all into the database. Come to think of it, this might be related to another bug report where birthdays still show up in the calendar when it's not supposed to show them. UBB.threads figures out birthdays by looking at the user profile table, they don't actually need to be inserted as an event.

What you should probably do is edit the classic_import.php file. Line 1866 of this file has:

$vars = array( "misc", "display", "registration", "calendar_events" );

You could change that to:

$vars = array( "misc", "display", "registration");

Okay, if I do that, Rick, do I just rerun the importer & it'll already KNOW to leave the members alone, or do I need to start from scratch again?

~Sue
adwoff.com

Perhaps - but undesirable behavior for ANY upgrade.

Since it stopped at the end of a step you can force it to continue at at the next step, which is the categories. Instead of just bringing up the classic_import.php script in your browser, bring it up like this:

classic_import.php?ubb=categories

Actually, it stopped while trying to import the events--I clicked the back button of my browser & it gave me the info I posted earlier.

So, I just put the "classic_import.php?ubb=categories" in the address window & click go?

I have to go to work, but if that's the case, I'll give it a shot in the morning when I get home and see what happens.

~Sue
adwoff.com

(Probably should've paid someone to take on this task! LOL)

Yeah, that should force it to go to the next step which is the categories.

If it stops, just refresh (or click the link, depending on what your screen shows when it dies) and it should start from where it left off.


And I agree with dave, start clean, don't start with a beta install.

Sheesh, Louise!

I step away to go to work, catch a few zzzzzzzzzz's, and what do you guys do? Upgrade to a new version!


Progress report--(knocking on wood furiously)--I finally got the importer to begin the forum conversion ... methinks I'm going to have to take out stock in Snickers, cuz I ain't going anywhere for a loooooooooooooong time before that process stops! LOL

But--(knocking on wood furiously)--so far, so good ...

I'll be back as soon as something weird crops up--I guarantee you that ... I also cannot wait to see how this beta goes--as it has some features I'm really, really interested in.

~Sue
adwoff.com

that is a good thing!

Okay. Here's my status.

The forums appear to have been converted (woo-freakin-HOOOOOO!), but an error has occurred with the converting of the mods:


I imagine this is a really easy fix ... I'm mostly interested in what to bump to next ...

I'll have to alter the importer to check for this, but it appears your classic files had a moderator listed twice for the same forum or something of that nature. You'll need to fix up your moderators after the import, but to go onto the next step you can just go to:

classic_import.php?ubb=buddy

Thanks, Rick! I actually figured it out (to go to "buddy") by looking at the *guts* ... and my Import is finally complete! Woo-HOO!

Strange thing: when I brought up the board via the forum list link, it showed some threads that were several years OLD as being the most recent ... I went into the forums, expecting complete chaos with the dates--but they seemed to be in order. So I just posted a new topic to bring everything up to date.


A couple minor cosmetic questions now: how do I keep from having my avatars skewed? For example, the red menace avatar I use here is my avatar at my site; here, it's the correct size--there, it's larger.

Also, how can I increase the size of the display of the graemlins? I am going to substitute out the stock ones, but most of them get skewed.

Thanks!

~Sue
adwoff.com

When I did my import in October, my avatars were all enlarged as well. It was because they all imported with width=0 and height=0. I don't know if that's the case with yours or not, but Rick had me run this to replace all the 0's with 64's. If that is the case with your import, you'd need to change 64 with whatever avatar sizes you're using (if they're all the same)...

[*BUG* Rick, when I don't put spaces before and after the code, when enclosed in CODE tags, I get nothing when I Preview Post -- and apparently also in the post itself. It does show up if I add a CR after the CODE tag]

HOLY TOLEDO, Rick & Company!

I checked my PMs to see how they transferred over, and I have over 250 pages of PMs!

The system kept duplicating the "Welcome to ADWOFF" message ... I'm going to be spending HOURS deleting them!

Makes me wonder if it happened to everyone!

~Sue
adwoff.com

Yeah, ALL PMs that weren't deleted by *both* parties remained in the system. Fun for nostalgic sake, but a pain if there are 1000s of them You'll need to tell your members to delete PMs to bring them back down below the "max PMs" set in your CP.

This was an obvious glitch in the import. *sigh*

~Sue <<-- still deleting

Not necessarily a glitch. Rick explained it way back when and it sorta made some sense.

I'll have to find his explanation, then, because it sure seems like a glitch to me.

I just spent a lot of time deleting out the dupe PMs, and I have a boat-load of others left over. It's almost like it re-created every PM I've had over the years.

Very, very strange--considering I had well under 60 PMs before the conversion, and now I have 28 pages of them.

If that's not a glitch, then I need to know what the definition of a glitch is! LOL

~Sue

I posted a fix for this somewhere, not sure where it is right now though lol...

Ahh, maybe it was this that I remembered reading. If so, then it wasn't Rick, it was Gizmo who said it was "all or nothing" and "designed behavior." So I guess blame Gizmo for all those hours you've spent deleting PMs - LOL

Figures Gizzy's at fault!

A new error has cropped up when I try to create a "custom island"



I probably should look @ the other threads to see if this has been addressed, eh?! LOL

~Sue <<-- going to look

I tried to put my site's "banner graphic" in my header, and received this error message:


Are these bugs *fixed* in the new upgrade, or is it just something funky as a result of my conversion?

~Sue
adwoff.com

hahaha, but i also posted an sql query to putge all of the welcome pm's hehe... somewhere anyway

The portal boxes shoudln't be errored out though suzieque, generally they error out if they've been edited and have an error in them; have you made any edits to the portal boxes?

Quick and dirty:

note to be sure you replace "forums_" with "yourprefix_"

when my fingers start feeling normal I may make a mod to clean up pm's, well, it'd be a drop-in, but still ...

The route I posted above is what I'm using at my site, and leaves the MESSAGE_USERS table alone so you end up wiht non-existant topics linked to... So I think I'll include a check to validate if the pm's exist and purge those which do not...

Shouldn't be too much work, though i'd clone my pm's from my live site to put on my dev site as to not b0rk things hehe... but it'll be a few days till i no longer have to peck at keys

Hey Gizzy~

I *thought* the only change I made was to add the Portal Columns ... I created "Post Islands" ...

I think I did muff up, though, when I tried to create the "Content Island." And now that you've mentioned it, that's indeed what I did. OOPS.

Well, that was easy!

Now let's see what else I can break!

~Sue
adwoff.com

Shoot. I do have another problem.

When I went to check on sending PMs, I get this message:


In the control panel, I have it set to "9"

I just sent a PM with a new name I registered to 11 different people.

*sigh*

Now what I have broken?!

~Sue
adwoff.com

I have faith in your forum destruction skills suzieque ...

Admin/Mod's are exempt from most checks.

I created a new user, and the new user has the abiity to invite UNLIMITED people to a private message.

The new user is just a regular joe. No special privileges.

~Sue

Ah, man ... thanks for the info.

Can anyone tell me what the typo is/where it is so that I don't have to upgrade it to 7.1?

I really wanted to be able to open my board in the morning.

~Sue
adwoff.com

i dont even have 3 friends to send christmas cards to, let alone send pm's to

Ah, poor Gizzy.


Looks like I'll have to try to upgrade to 7.1--because unfortunately, a lot of my community *believe* they are everyone's best friends.

~Sue
adwoff.com

ETA: I'm a doofus. Didn't realize 7.1 wasn't available to everyone yet ...

If you go to the changelog, you'll find the link in that entry...

7.1 is in beta; where it's running here and ubbdev (and my dev machine that there is a seldom link to here and there) it won't be out for some time

The FIX is in a link in the changelog -- here it is.

Ok, my pm rebuilder currently allows for the purging of welcome messages, I'm currently contemplating how to check the users table for valid messages, if one is invalid it'll purge the users table (I'm doing this as several people have used my previous way of purging welcome messages which doesn't effect the users table, so there is lingering data).

Ok, my long awaited (aka just coded) welcome message purger can be found here.

Gizzy, you da man, but I'm gonna make my members suffer and delete their PMs just like I had to! LOL

----

I have a couple questions, and I ask that you forgive me if they've been asked/answered elsewhere ...

Why don't the member numbers appear under member names/avatars? I found that # to be invaluable whenever I went into the control panel to do something with individual member files. It's a PITA to have to "search" for the person and then plug the # in.

---

Speaking of avatars, why don't the avatars appear in the I.E. browser?

---

That's all the ?s I can think of right now. My brain is fried!

So far, the feedback I've been receiving from my community has been extremely positive.

~Sue
adwoff.com

awwe purging pm's is mean! I'm not sure what kind of community you have, but we run a tech forum so if i where to purge pm's i'd be purging reference data, contact info, server data, design specifications... wow...

IT was discussed and found to be pointless to have it there during cleanup of the code pages (i believe), you can just click the "view profile link" (or hover over it) and it'll tell you the user number in the link itself (you're member "52"). Additionally, from the view user screen there is a link to edit the user in the cp. Having the number shown on the posts when it's already shown numerous times for all of the links (see the popup when you click on a nickname) seemed kind of redundant (as it was already presant).

If you do'nt set the height and width (aka leave the fields blank) in the cpanel the software will show a value of blank, which IE interprets as 0x0; I think 7.1 will have it set to not show any value for height and width if the fields are left blank.

gimme more questions, i am the Gizzy Monster! hehe...

still hyped up on energy drinks...

Ah. That explains it!

Bring on 7.1! LOL


I do have another question. In the past, with Classic, all registration requests were sent to only my e-mail address. Now they--and other administrative type tasks--are being sent to ALL my admins' addies.

Is there any way I can have the notifications sent to just my e-mail?

~Sue
adwoff.com

As I posted on the previous page in this thread, IF THE IMPORT didn't carry over your avatar values, you can perform the following query to set all avatar widths and heights from 0 to whatever you wish:


If all your avatars are the same width/height, you can change the 64's to whatever your avatars are...

But set the max values in CP first and see if that's all it was...

jgeoff, thats great if all of your avatars are the same size, but who has all avitars as the same size? imo a better solution would be to drop the height/width from the template and let the images load as they will, versus forcing a height and width on them all (I don't think i have more than maybe 2 avatars that are 80x80, and have hundreds using other dimensions).

I do!

I like to keep things tidy, so all the "house" avatars I created are the same size - the same as my max size. Those who choose to upload or link to other avatars are still forced to that size (originally 64x64 but I upped it to 72x72 since converting) anyway.

That fix was because my old avatars were brought in as 0x0 (for whatever reason), yet they all should've been 64x64. I also had to do that because now that my new size is 72x72, I wanted the original avatars to remain at 64x64 without being resized up.

I made this suggestion so at least her avatars would show up, in the mean time.