Migration from vBulletin to Invision Power Board - Operation Boarding Party

So, now that my back has been sufficiently augmented, I am now unencumbered by my previous painful non-ambulatory state. Your Administrator is now an active Admin. The time has come to implement the long awaited, much needed overhaul of the WWII Forums. It is finally happening!

Some Background
A few years ago, vBulletin was widely regarded as the very best online discussion forum software in use. I gladly adopted their product as it was a supremely functional tool. vBulletin developers were renowned for their diligence, style, and focus on security. A couple years ago the vBulletin brand was bought by a new holding company, and unfortunately these former positive traits were not fully adopted. Many of us experienced a good deal of the virus problems and lack of any graphical themes. Now vBulletin is releasing the next generation of the platform, version 5. I am not going to be using their product any further.

vBulletin to Invision Power Board
After extensive research and review of other discussion boards, I've made the decision to migrate to Invision Power Board (IPB). The IPB product today has many of the great features you Rogues have been asking for. Once the move is complete we will have a many great new features, be a tiny bit faster, have an actual WW2 Theme, and be more protected from malware. We will even have a small chat room.

Full Scale Import by a Pro
The migration, dubbed Operation Boarding Party, will import the over half million messages you Rogues have posted here since the year 2000. The process will also maintain existing private messages, friends, signatures, even your attachments. The project will be guided by a developer who performed installations and migrations for six years as an employee of Invision. Though a bit costly, we are in very good hands. Money wisely invested in my opinion.

Timeframe
We are in the testing mode now. A copy of our current database is undergoing full conversion on a test server. The goal was to have the migration complete by the end of March, but we are far ahead of schedule with completion expected by March 16th. Whatever happens, our pace will be slow, steady, and safe, we will only make the move when we are 100% certain data will not be lost.

I will update this thread as we complete each migration step:

Operation Boarding Party

• Backup & Test Migrations on mirror server <--- Complete
• Installation of IPBoard <--- In Progress
• Installation of IPGallery <--- In Progress
• Import of all forum data from vBulletin to IPB (some downtime)
• Import of WorldWar2Talk.com data (some downtime)
• Installation on WW2 themed template. Remember what we used to look like?

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I am very excited about this transition, we will be a safer, more productive, better community afterward. Please be patient while we move this along. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at the gmail address in my sig.

Note: In addition the steps just outlined, I am pleased to finally honor a commitment made a long while ago concerning WorldWar2Talk.com. higge, a WW2 discussion board webmaster and member here requested I take control the data from his site. It was only a few thousand posts, but he wanted the messages to have a permanent home online. At the time I agreed, but technical difficulties with the import as well as technical difficulties with my spine intervened. Having this commitment outstanding was a matter I always wanted to resolve. I'm very happy to say our new IPB forum will include all the data from what was WorldWar2Talk.com. Please note that this is not our sister site WW2Talk.com.

 

Thanks belasar, trying to make up for lost time.

 

You may be excited, but I am ecstatic.

 

It will be great to see the old/new background. One of the things that caught my eye when I first found the site!

 

I am, but I'm not sure how involved he will be. Hopefully he comes back soon.

Yes.

No one is more pleased than I about returning to active duty.

 

It looked nice, didn't it?

Here it is in Nov 2009, courtesy of the Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20081102103906/http://www.ww2f.com/

It looked like this around the time I joined in 2007:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070306152315/http://ww2f.com/

 

I can't wait. I remember the old look. It was part of what made this site unique. I'm glad you are back Otto. It's nice to have your voice around.

 

Well it won't be the old look as that was an older software version, incompatible with what we havbe now and what we will soon have. It will be a new look, one that will look as good as the old one I screen capped above.

And I truly can't tell you how great it feels to be mobile, active, and productive. I had some seriously dark times these past couple years, and my return to duty is a tremendous victory in my life. Hopefully we will all benefit from my recovery.

 

Nice to have you around, Ron. I'm glad you're around here as well.