Major Surgery - A Difficult Task, Just Got A Little Bit Easier

[Hells Warrrior]

Man, this has taken 2 days to get to this stage. Thanks to Nick transferring the relevant databases I needed to perform "Major" surgery, I have been able to get the following fixed.

 

I have managed, "drum roll" to get the vBulletin forum, converted to Invision Forum Software. Stage one of the 48 hour surgery complete. I'm not bashing anyone, not what I'm here to do, but it was unfortunately in a bit of a mess and took a bit of work to get into a working state.

 

Database wise, tables had crashed, needing repaired & the database itself was over 4Gb in size, so importing it through phpmyadmin is a no go and needs to be done at the shell level or have the tables broken up and inserted and then the insert comments inserted.

 

Thankfully, I was able to shell the database into a new database, I was able to get the tables repaired and optimized and WE are one step closer to recovering

• Asylum
• Training Facility
• Research Facility

So what we thought we had lost, is now 1 step closer to being recovered (completely). Now the difficult task, is to ensure that when I go to import the tables that exist for topics and posts converted from vBulletin, do not clash with the topic/post reference ID's on the current forum. Obviously we won't be performing this on the live site until I'm confident that everything will work the way it is intended to do so.

 

I said we had a lot more to bring you & this is another of the things I've personally wanted to do since the very day I initially offered help.

 

Anyway, here's a little post to wet your appetites - this doesn't mean it will work, so I just wanted to warn you now that it might not. However, I'm confident I can get things merged with the current forum database without issues.

 

[GRILL]

You are the man, Craig - this is HUGE news.

[Slade]

 

^way fixed image

[PINNAZ]

I will swim to Scotland to shake your hand if you can bring back those forums. Even though they are still accessible. We need them here. The posts in those forums are a massive part of this website.

I & many others will be very thankful. Good luck.

[Flammenwerfer]

The news just keeps getting better and better, eh?

[Boom115]

Nice job sir, you're doing great things for this place!

[Hells Warrrior]

Bit of a setback folk's, a few tables locked up during the night, so I'm going to reduce the amount of posts and topics being converted (most of them are spam anyway).

 

So I need to do it again from scratch but it's nothing to worry about it.

[Hells Warrrior]

Just a quick update.

 

I've deleted over 700,000 spam posts and over 400,000 topic titles from the vBulletin forum, this will make the conversion process go a lot smoother on the test site (both vBulletin and Invision are in test enviroments and not the live versions).

 

So, conversion number 2 in process. As so much crap has been removed I shouldn't have any tables lock up with errors & it should "in theory" be a lot smoother.

[TheNathanNS]

God damn, I actually thought this was about some serious surgery you had Hells. 

 

 

Well, I guess it's good to know you haven't had any major surgery.

[Hells Warrrior]

Ach well, I suppose I better share the news with you all then eh!

 

[Rissole25]

You're so awesome Craig. Thank you for doing this.

Any idea how you'll structure it all? I imagine the original Asylum will merge with the new one. But will the Training Facility and Research Facility return? Or will the posts in there be moved to respective forums?

[Hells Warrrior]

Well, I was thinking of putting them alongside the current asylum and stories/theories & leaving them intact but merge the asylums into one. I felt it would be a little unfair to split the work up so leaving it as is but tidier is the way forward.

[PINNAZ]

Awesome!

Agree that merging the Asylum & adding the research & Training underneath would probably be the most streamline way to go.

Thanks so much for your time again friendo! CoDz owes you.

[Hells Warrrior]

Well, still got a bit of testing to do before I do it on a live forum but everything & I mean everything, is pointing towards this being successful. Once that's done, I can probably say, the work that I joined the staff to do is complete. What's left ?

 

Obviously the community, but that goes without saying - but things that have been broken have returned, new forum software and so forth - so what's left to be done, what does the community want? I've got minor things to do but the large work will be complete.

[Matuzz]

It will be awesome to get my info for newcomers thread and asylum threads back. Thank you very much!