UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums Thread Like Summary - Upgrade from UBB.threads 6.3.2 to 7.7.3

Could someone point me to an upgrade path/procedure to upgrade from UBB.threads 6.3.2 to 7.7.3

cegadm, no worries. I've just been summarizing (via quote) what Ruben has written through the thread.

Your work on this has been much appreciated, and will assist to review that 15 year old code and make corrections for directly moving from 6.5 to 7.7.4 or whatever the most current version of UBBT is... so no one else would need to go down this path again.

Both RUben and Gizmo are experts and provide services to upgrade UBBT Classic to the current version of UBB.threads. So both of these guys have a long history of the work you've been documenting here.

Again, thank you very much for the time you've spent and the work you've produced with your research.

Woohoo! Success!

Removing those files from upgrade_changes.txt did the trick. The upgrade script continued on its way.

I then encountered this problem with image libraries. Using Ruben's advice there, I updated each image setting in the Control Panel / Styles section.

Running happy as a clam on PHP 7.3.

I still have to update the forum view settings for non-admin users. Then it's off to push from my test machine to the live site.

Thanks all again for the help!

jjjjj, I hope you have similar success and I apologize for taking this thread over.

I never went from ubb threads v6 to v7.
I went from ubb classic to ubb threads 7.2.

So after you purchase member access I would upgrade to ubbthreads 6.5.5 then goto say ubbthreads 7.2
Watch out for the extra global moderator group. ( in my case all regular moderators became global moderators) But it is a easy fix because there never were Global Mod's in your version
After that you should be able to upgrade to the current v7 version.
Just read the upgrade directions in the install folder at each step.
You could take smaller steps in upgrading but it will take longer.

And hopefully you don't have any mods installed.

When upgrading to the most current UBB.threads version available, be sure you are using the most recent version UBB.threads archive. It is very rare but it does happen, that only the installer/upgrade scripts within archive sometimes get revised to fix rare/fringe install/upgrade issues as they are discovered.

For example, on March 31st 2020, the installer/upgrader scripts within UBBT 7.7.4 received fixes related to UBBT 7.0.0 (2006: cache builder), MySQL 4 (2008: storage "type" vs "engine"), language strings from UBBT 7.0.0 (2006: duplicated entry terms), and a conditional statement correction related to php 7.1+ for disabled styles.

If you you're already running the current version of the forum software, there is nothing within the installer/upgrader that affects you or changes your already installed software.

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As posted earlier in this thread by Ruben, this is a correct path for upgrading from UBB.threads 6.5.5 (released May 31, 2006):

Well this jogged some memories for me.
The last classic upgrade I did was about 2 years ago.
For threads it looks to be even older than that.
I sill had a backup on my nas.
It appears that I had similar issues because I used ubb 7.5.4.2 as the first step from threads.
I recall looking for the old importers prior to 2007 with no luck.
Same goes for classic because the importers were revamped by Rick in 2007.

The hardest part in classic is due to mods.
I would have to reinstall classic to get rid of them so the importer would run.

Comment those files out of the install/upgrade_changes.txt file.

This sometimes occurs when files are added in one version, then removed in another, during various upgrades; and the updates which affect those files aren't fully removed from the changes file (which can lead to this issue)

Once you are on any version of UBBT 7.x, you can run the upgrader contained within the UBBT 7.7.4 archive with PHP 7, and it will upgrade your database and files to version 7.7.4.

This thread suggests that you make the leap from UBBT 6.5.x (php4/5) -> 7.2.0 (php5) -> 7.7.4 (php5/7)

EDIT:
My memory is a bit fuzzy with the MySQL supported versions of UBBT 6. I want to say its only supported to MySQL 5.1 and earlier, but we're talking about 15 year old software that really should not still be running. Mozilla was still on FF 2.6, IE was on version 4.0.1, and people were excited about Windows Vista :/

UBB.threads does not support PHP7 until UBB.threads 7.7+.

In PHP7 the mysql_ connectors were dropped in favor of the mysqli_ connectors; this required a major rewrite to fully support PHP7 (as some connectors were completely dropped due to similar functionality in other connectors).

The importer scripts are designed to be run from the respected final builds of UBB.Classic6 (6.7.x) and UBB.Threads6 (6.5.x).

The global moderator group permission was added in UBB.threads v7.3, so the upgrade path has always been:
Latest v6 build Imported to -> UBB.threads 7.2 -> Latest v7 (it isn't required to do an incremental update to v7.3 as the upgrade utility should do all of those incremental steps for you, but in the past this was a step).

I would recommend running a dry run before spring things down to do a final migration (to ensure everything goes smoothly).

I would also recommend that you run my UBB.threads System Requirements Test script (here) to ensure your web host is compatible.

Nice update at the wiki Gizmo.

Since the current importer doesn't function for anything lower than v7.5.6 (the original importer worked for v7.2) users migrating from UBB.Threads6 or UBB.Classic may see problems with their groups; imported content using the UBB.threads importers can assign your users v7.0 Group Numbers vs v7.2 Group Numbers:


v7.0 Groups:
1 - Administrator
2 - Moderator
3 - Users
4 - Guests


v7.2+ Groups:
1 - Administrator
2 - Global Moderator
3 - Moderator
4 - Users
5 - Guests


As the users are not assigned any forums to "moderate" there isn't really any concern, we just need to place them in their proper groups. You'll need to migrate the Moderator and User group indications to a higher id. As the Global Moderator group doesn't exist from the imported UBB products, we don't have to account for it.

Here we are moving group #3 (old users) to group #4, and group #2 (old moderators) to group #3 (in this order)


If you are using a different database prefix (other than ubbt_) you'll need to account for it in the queries. I would execute both queries separately, but in the exact order that they are presented (if you run the second first you'll have to re-assign your moderators, and may have to remove duplicate entries in the user group for them).