Forum
It surely sounds a bit premature to reactivate it now, but one of the biggest databases I found among my backups was the old shop forum’s. It took me two full hours to completely transfer all data from the old database to the new one. I also wanted to change platform altogether migrating to a solution that is way more secure, robust, flexible and feature-rich. I also wanted to play a bit with this old data, I admit. I am quite sure ninety percent of the email address herein contained are not working anymore after 5 to 6 years but who cares? I still won’t publish link to the forum right now because I want to clean up some of the more shameful posts about future projects that never came to reality. I also need to drop a few hundred spam messages that somehow wormholed into the old forum.
Technical details for those who care: the old database was a stupid access file that underlaid Snitz Forums. I needed bullzip’s fantastic utility Access to MySQL to convert Access data into a MySQL dump file. I could also do direct transfer via ODBC but I preferred it this way. Obviously I needed to install MySQL’s ODBC for Win before that. That meant another annoying registration – sigh – my KeePass file is becoming huge! Once done that, I installed PHPBB 2.0 (no, you can’t use the converter for Access directly to PHPBB 3.0… umph), ran the import utility I got from Japanese Sourceforge – at the time the US website wasn’t working (http://sourceforge.net/projects/snitz2phpbb/) then upgraded to PHPBB 3.0 using the built-in upgrader. That was surprisingly smooth except for a few errors which I managed to fix along the way.
The road to salvation is obscure indeed!
Tags: Keepass, MySQL ODBC, PHPBB, Snitz Forums, Snitz to PHPBB conversion, Sourceforge