UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback WWWThreads Comments

For the past three years my site had been using WebBBS as its discussion forum software. From version 4 onwards the scripts have become a nightmare and seem totally unstable and incapable of coping with a large number of messages.

After a bit of digging around I found WWWThreads which is wonderful! With a true database back-end, cross-forum searches, user settings and more it is so much more powerful, a lot faster and more user friedly.

I'm now a loyal fan of it and with my discussion forums being converted to it tomorrow I guess I'll find out if they think the same!

Cool. Someone wanted to convert Mattsbbs to threads. I got a bid from the programmer I work with who is very good and professional (and therefore expensive. I wonder if it might be worth developng converters from the popular boards...ubb, matts bbs, selena, web bbs...
to make transition easy on allwho have seen the light :)

Renee Levant [b]Oracle Web Services[b]
[email protected]

Scream has mentioned that once version 5 if complete then this is one of the next areas to be looked at. However, I would like to get my messages across ASAP so I may put together a hacked solution for now which will be cumbersome but will hopefully work!

Perl-based converters would be best so if anyone reading this knows Perl and has some free time ... !!

I don't think that the conversion process from WebBBS[]/w3timages/icons/mad.gif[/] would be too difficult because the message file format is fairly basic.

What I understand about this is that all the pages need to be parsed and read into a mysql
table. If this is true, it will involve writing a script to traverse
the pages, parse each one, and send the fields in a select statement to the
mysql table.

And doing something about the differences of fields between the two.
The guy who does database stuff for me thinks the job will take 3-4 hours.
but he wants money (I wonder if there are some perl or php geeks around
(php works particularly nice with mysql) and if Scream moight make a deal with them if they wrote it up for
web bbs and Matts board (chowhound are you listening ;))

Renee Levant [b]Oracle Web Services[b]
[email protected]

From my initial look into this I think that a solution would be to do the following ...

1. Working through each of the WebBBS files, read in the contents of each file and write it to a delimited text file on the server. This will build up a file that contains all of the WebBBS posts.
2. Using mySQL, write the contents of this file into a new table.
3. Use an append query to insert the contents of the new table into the WWWThreads table. During the append query you can fill in the 'gaps' such as the board details, the poster's details, etc.

If I can get my hands on a Perl script that will read the WebBBS files into a single file then I should be able to do the rest from there.

here is your script to copy webbbs files into a single file

cp * singlefile

I think having the files separate is easier!! Just read one file at a time till you read the entire directory, skipping a few files that are not posts (counter, etc)

Scream, please make a few database innput routines. Like putpost(), registeruser()

Then converters need only parse the other database and then call the routines already provided by Scream to input into the webbbs database

Thanks for reminding me of my converting question []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/] probably no solution but I'll post in the Q&A anyway...

Muhammad Chishti
Creative dIRECTOR
http://www.imcuniverse.com