Reboot of forum

Who thought it was a good idea to re-boot the entire forum and erase everyone's past history? When did this discussion occur, as I seem to have missed it. Also, please tell me what was wrong with the forum functionality as it was prior to this current re-boot?

We're working hard to move over the 203 most recent posts that didn't make the changeover.

gcthree...

Pretty sure all of the content except the 203 posts (in progress) was transferred, and except for the technical info that was linked (also in progress).
I know it's hard to remember, but can you give us an example of other missing content and categories?

gcthree....
I did a search on your username and found 269 posts. Without knowing the title of your topic, I can't confirm whether it's there or not.

I also selected 'My Topics' and found only the new topics, none from before the move. We're hoping that the software update will fix that, and in the meantime I'll add that to the bug report under the suggestions topic.

You mentioned some Categories were missing; do you know which ones?

Wyattsride....

I've sent you an email with a question about your email preferences for the site.

Hi smt....
Thanks for your kind words. We're working to make it valuable for our valued members like you. If you see anything that needs work, or that you'd like to see added please let us know.

As was mentioned elsewhere, because we couldn't match forum usernames with membership roster actual names when the information was imported, many folks ended up with two accounts. You were one, but I've just corrected that - as we've done with about ten others today and at least that many in the last week and a half.

In doing so, I've had to change your password and will email you with the temporary one.

You now have your post count restored and member status changed on the Forum.

The forum rankings are presently :
Junior Member 20 posts
Senior Member 40
Premium Member 80
Elite Member 160
Platinum Member 320

And do not relate to any OC Membership status. They names and counts can be changed.

We're working on some tables and a map that will identify charter members - a very valued category!

gcthree.....
You were the victim of the fabled 'misalignment', i.e. the forum was misaligned with the membership module and it didn't know you were a member (you had two different user accounts, one when the forum was transferred and one when the membership info was uploaded) Since the forum didn't know your 'real' name we had no way of matching the two. Hence you did not have access to the member areas where your posts are patiently waiting for you to show up and join them.

Everything should be aligned now; but please let us know if you have any more problems.

Thank you for letting us know, and thank you for your OC membership.

Bill VV

Bob,
We're working on the photos, but after a couple days of trying to move bits and bytes around it's time to call in the experts. It seems the images stored in the old forum software were saved as 'blobs' that are defying decryption. They're there, and there are services that claim they can do it; it will just take a little time to organize.

By the way, is your car registered? I think there's a way to add a link in the Registry to the forum thread; if you want we can make that happen. It's also very easy to do the reverse; just click on a Registry entry and copy/paste the link that shows up in the browser.

Update on the forum issues;
We've contacted two vendors who advertise that they can migrate a Vbulletin forum to a Kunena forum, neither of which require payment until we're satisfied with the results. With the poking around in the databases I've done in the past week, I'm convinced that this is the way we should go to make sure that absolutely no content is missing in the new forum.

I'm hoping this can be accomplished by this time next week; we need to set up a cloned site where they can place the new database and we can test it without affecting the live site, then they need 3-4 days to do the work, and finally we need to do the testing itself to satisfy ourselves that everything is there.

I think we can make the test site available to anyone that wants to help, so if you have had problems or have threads that have lots of images and/or are especially valuable to you, and are willing to help, please let me know.

Bill