Forum Retrograded

[Jeffro]

Decided to just revert the forum back to it's original form on December 30th, 2009. Any threads created since then have been lost even though I have a backup file with those threads in tact. I apologize for the loss in threads but I needed to do this instead of messing around with Vbulletin 4. I will continue to leave the forum on the current version and update as necessary (security updates) until this theme as well as the two mods I rely on are available for version four.

[Ryan]

Will the old posts be returning?

[Jeffro]

I have them in a backup file that I did before I reverted the forum. If you know of a way to bring those threads or posts into this database, I'm all ears because I don't.

[Ryan]

How about you move it back to version 4 then?

It's not exactly motivating to post around here if I think you are going to just wipe my posts randomly.

[Jeffro]

Like I said, I've got the threads, I just need an idea on how to get them back into this forum. It's only four days worth and I didn't think there were that many posts from what I saw other than in the announcement of the forum switching to Vbulletin 4. I do have the posts, they are not lost. I just need to figure out how I can export them or import them. Maybe I'll look into impex or something

[Ryan]

I had similar'ish situation with my own forum once as I wanted to convert from using blog comments to a forum and so I just manually recreated all of the posts in the forum. It took a while as there a few thousand posts to rebuild, but I got there in the end. However all of the dates were messed up and I didn't have to deal with registered users.

I guess if you are able to log in as each user, you could rebuild the posts, then go into phpMyAdmin and modify the dates. With SMF I'm pretty sure I'd need to copy the hashed version of the users password from the database, change it something I know, create the posts, then re-add the hashed password back into the database again. There might be a faster way to do it in vBulletin though.

Is there by an chance a post importer for vBulletin like WordPress has? If there was, then you could import them all that way. It would save a lot of hassle of having to manually rebuild them all.

[Jeffro]

You make it sound like there are hundreds of posts missing when only those created between December 30th and January 3rd are the ones missing. VBulletin does have an importer/exporter which I will take a look at today to see if I can easily restore the posts from those four days.

[kaambiz]

Sometimes ago I had similar issue. impex is no good at this situations. the number of posts I was trying to recover was not high so here's waht I did:
Installed this: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=215096
it gives you the ability to post as members (and change post/topic owner/IP etc).
copy/pasted all those topics and changed my name to theirs.

[andreasnrb]

There were almost no serious posts made after the change, I check in everyday and was disappointed. The theme was not very inviting I think.

[Jeffro]

Thanks for the mod link Kaambiz. Since there were not that many threads, posts made, I'll definitely look into installing this mod and then adding in the ones we are missing.