UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 7 Importer Support All Forum IDs Changed

I imported my UBB Threads database and every single forum ID (we have over 400 sites) just changed. Why? Now every old link in our system and archives has broken, and I have to go through my live site and update every ID number to point to its new match - and there's no rhyme nor reason as to the change. I can't just subtract 2 everywhere, sometimes it's off by 1, sometimes by 4, etc.

UBB7 is a new product, from the ground up... You can't even really call it UBB.Threads (other than the fact UBB.Threads7 was the name chosen for it). When things where imported, they where assigned new id's; this counts for users, posts, forums, threads, categories, etc.

You can use the redirector scripts that come with the UBB7 import files to redirect _old_ links to _new_ links.

The redirector script doesn't do that. It doesn't know what the old ID was, to equate it to the new ID. I had to go into my live system database and change every ID by hand, to get at least the main links working. Every old URL in our system, in newsletters and articles and such - are all now invalid. The links to the "low carb forum" at ID xxx now point to the Entertainment News forum, because the ID has changed.

I agree the software is changed. But I don't see the need to randomly change the IDs of forum rows in the database, since they had IDs in the old system and IDs in the new system.

Topic/Posts/Forum id's should have transversed, they should be in the import_maps table which works only for the redirectors...

If you mean by transversed that the forum ID should have remained the same from the old to the new software, that isn't the case. Every forum ID except the first few (maybe IDs 1-10) changed. Some changed by 1, some changed by 2 and so on up to 4 I believe.

The redirectors send the incoming person to the wrong destination forum based on the ID #.

No, that isn't what i meant.

All of the id's of the old forums, posts, threads, users, etc should be stored in a separate table (import_maps), which only the redirector scripts use to send users to the proper locations.

The redirectors should have come with your importer.

FWIW, I remember having the same problem when I imported. But since no one else was complaining about it, I figured it was just me...

No bug, everything is re-indexed when inserted into the new MySQL database; the import_map was added in one of the early versions when we where tinkering with the importers, so the old data could reach the proper new locations.

True, the re-directors included with the import scripts *should* re-direct everyone to the correct place.

Here's an original URL -

http://forums.bellaonline.com/postlist.php?Cat=0&Board=225

all the redirector - the one supplied by UBB - does is send the person to the new forum's home page.

If I use the new forum URL with the old ID, it goes to the wrong board completely. So I just finished re-coding my entire live site with all new forum IDs. However, this doesn't help all those old URLs hard coded into articles and such.

If you believe the redirector is broken, I'd be pleased to see how that is to be fixed.

I believe that Rick said that was intended behavior, when you're linking just to a specific forum you'll get the forum list. (I'd rather such links to go specific forums as well)

If you link to a specific thread or post, however, it should redirect to that specific thread or post as intended.

The redirector works fine on my site. It looks like your site is closed?

It works well on mine too (coming from UBB.C); the PHPBB redirectors we tested privatley also work well for me... As I dind't come from .Threads I cant vouch for how well they work.

the redirector only sends people to the main forum list - it does not fully redirect

We had exactly the same problem, with a large number of links.

Fortunately, we tend to use links such as http://www.fansfocus.com/hornchurch - and so I had to just update a hundred or so links in a vhost.conf file.

Sadly I had to scrap our menu system - as this was all based around the old forum names of say /hornchurch rather than /123 - the new forum id numbers as opposed to words are more problematic for my php skills LOL

So the threads redirectors don't work?

My Classic board remains in read-only mode w/ a link to Threads. The links should redirect to the Threads board. I'm keeping the Classic board up for a while just to be sure things are okay, and, to remind me what it used to look like...

I like threads more, it gives me more things to break lol

nope - I assumed it only redirected to the forumlist page.

I assumed they would work like the UBB.C ones...

Lol, guess you can tell what product most of the beta testers came from :ahem:

Unfortunately, with over 400 forums, redirecting someone who was trying to go to the "football forum" to the master list of "every single forum in the system" isn't exactly helpful And since we've been around for five years, and have hundreds of thousands of pages on the site (never mind on other peoples' sites), it's pretty much impossible for us to update all of those old links. I guess I will move on to other issues I can actually fix!

Hi Bella,

I really wish I had more experience in PHP programming as I'm sure this can be corrected. One needs to know the internal workings of the application more though. I really think if you had the right person helping you it should be possible to restore the ID numbers back to their original values (would probably initially need to remove all sessions which would force everyone to remember their password or get it sent to them again) but surely it can be done.

Best of luck and I hope you get it fixed back to how it was.

.

the system was not based around id numbers before - they were alphanumeric - and could be anything, as opposed to the numbers now used.

Yes but someone with intimate knowledge of the code could make it work how they wanted. Not sure anyone would take that on but I'm sure it can be done.

Just feeling empathetic for their plight is all.

Well, but our IDs were all numeric. If they can do a mapping table of the threads saying old thread = new thread, I should think they could do a mapping table of the forums saying old forum = new forum, whether the original was alphanumeric or numeric, it's just two columns in a table, where it says

if incoming_val = "xxxx" then new_id = YY