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@Velocio
As many of you know, LFGSS is going to be migrating from vBulletin to Microcosm in the near future (weeks, not months).
When we migrate the process roughly follows this:
1) Turn off the site
2) Backup everything
3) Produce an export of all of the data in a neutral format
4) Import from the neutral format
5) Turn on the site
We estimate that this will take less than a day to complete.
The reason for this thread is that there will be some changes initially. No two forum systems are perfectly alike and things exist in some systems that don't exist in another, and there are mild differences between systems.
The big message: Make sure your email address is correct, that you have access to the email account related to your profile, and if you have aliases these will all be merged into the oldest account that shares the email address... if you don't want your aliases merged you should make sure each one has a unique email address.
We have written our own exporter to export vBulletin to JSON.
There are some limitations to the exporter as some things are unique to vBulletin.
Reputation, a.k.a. comments. These are not exported as the reputation system in vBulletin calculates reputation in a very unique and complex way, and this only makes sense if the destination system imports and can use reputation in precisely the same way. This isn't true of any software other than another instance of vBulletin.
Forum hierarchies. We will be moving to a flat list of forums, ordered by popularity, we will no longer have hierarchies.
Private messages: If you have BCC'd someone, then this is converted to a CC as not all systems have the concept of a BCC.
Albums: As found here, https://www.lfgss.com/all_albums.php these are not presently exported but we will loop back and do this when Microcosm supports Galleries.
Tags: Not exported at all, and due to the fact that a lot of people regarded them as private we are not betraying that expectation by exporting them. They are also a hack on vBulletin, and we're concentrating on core data. #hashtags are available in Microcosm to aid search.
Social groups: As found here, https://www.lfgss.com/allgroups.html are not being exported as they are largely dead. Microcosm will allow you to create your own forums, but we're not bringing the old data from vBulletin social groups.
Profile comments: As found on your profile, these are not exported.
On importing into Microcosm some other things happen. The key one is that vBulletin treats the username as your identifier (why you can't change your username) whereas Microcosm treats your email address as the identifier.
Things you should do in preparation for the migration, and if you care about these things you should do them soon:
If you need access to album photos in the near future, you really should download the photos in albums and keep a copy.
If you have multiple aliases with the same email address, these will be merged if the email addresses are still the same when the export is done. You should login to each alias account and change the email address to something unique. The merge process will always keep the oldest account, all aliases will be merged into the oldest account. You can change the username once we're live on Microcosm (and you can change the username whenever you like, there are no limitations on that).
If you care deeply about your reputation comments, you will want to save them somehow. Unfortunately vBulletin doesn't provide a mechanism for these, so this is basically a take screenshots of your rep comments thing.
If you care about anything within a social group you will want to save that somehow. Again, this probably means taking screenshots of social group pages.
If you care about comments left on your profile you will want to save those. Again, take screenshots of your profile comments.
If you know you have private messaged someone via BCC and you really do not want the other recipients to know you included them... delete the private message (the sent copy if you were the sender, the received copy if you were the BCC recipient).
The big message again: Make sure your email address is correct, that you have access to the email account related to your profile, and if you have aliases these will all be merged into the oldest account that shares the email address... if you don't want your aliases merged you should make sure each one has a unique email address.
Repeating it again, if you don't want an alias merged, you should ensure the alias has a unique email address.
It's all about the email addresses.
What we are migrating over:
All of that stuff will work as you expect.
The size of the export? Currently 52GB of data: