A couple weeks ago I did my first full community migration to Flarum, the first of its kinda from Vanilla (to my knowledge). I'm willing to do a few more for free to work out further issues with the forum migration software I'm building.
Criteria:
- non-commercial community
- less than 5 million posts
- no hate speech on site
- timeline is 1-3 months (estimate only, depends on my weekend availability)
- your forum is on the list I currently support
Major Support:
- Vanilla
- vBulletin
- SMF
- phpBB
- PunBB
- MyBB
- NodeBB
- FluxBB
- XenForo
- bbPress
- Drupal
- IPBoard
It also supports less common forums like SimplePress, Kunena, Esotalk, Toast, ModXDiscuss, JForum, WebWiz, Yaf, MVC, ExpressionEngine, Q2A, UserVoice, Advanced Forum, ASPPlayground, and AnswerHub.
If you want to move from Discourse, I don't have a package ready, but I'd be interested in a longer-term project to add support for it if you have time (or can just give me a SQL dump to test).
Caveats:
I'm not currently able to provide troubleshooting assistance for setting up a new Flarum site. You will need to set it up ahead of time with the appropriate plugins (I will provide a list of standard extensions to use if you want things like badges or private messages to transfer).
You will be responsible for moving files (uploads and avatars) separately. I'll provide instructions for that as well.
You will also be responsible for any redirects you wish to set up. Happy to provide advice from what I know, but that's not something I'm willing to set up for you today.
Workflow:
- You do a SQL export, zip it, and send me a link via a file service like Dropbox.
- We'll discuss how to handle special edge cases in your forum and I'll iterate on it for a bit.
- I'll provide 1 test SQL export for you to evaluate and provide feedback on issues you find.
- I will fix issues I'm willing and able to, then we'll pick a day for the final migration.
- Expect a full day of downtime. When ready, put your site into maintenance mode and send the final SQL export the same way. I'll return the finish product the same way.
I will provide a UTF-8 export regardless of what you initially provide. It's important you FORCE the test & final import to use UTF-8 encoding rather than letting the database tool detect and set it itself.
Security:
I'm willing to sign a very, very narrow NDA about data privacy if you require it. However, also note I have far more data security experience than most folks running forums (I drove application-level security efforts at Vanilla Forums Inc for most of its existence), so rest assured your data will only exist on encrypted drives and/or behind 2-factor authentication on my side, and I have no interest in it beyond improving & testing the migration software. The only time it's exposed is while we're transmitting it to each other via Dropbox link. Do not upload a data export to this site.
Interested? Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/rdB1SmgGNPMU6rML6
Post here or email me ( linc at icrontic.com ) with questions. Also happy to answer questions about DIY migrations or otherwise talk shop about communities.
