A few months ago the cherished if somewhat moribund forum for the Martian Cartel, the gaming group I’ve been part of since 1999 (!) went down with a database error. Since the forum gets little traffic these days it wasn’t a high priority for me to figure out what happened.
Tonight I finally decided to have a look. This is where the puzzle begins.
I am a database expert in the same way a doorstop is an excellent brain surgeon. My cursory appraisal confirmed the database was still there. Whether it was repairable or mangled beyond recognition I could not tell.
I had a Xenforo license kicking around so decided to install it and then attempt to import the vBulletin database from the old forum, a feature Xenforo handily supports.
Don’t be fooled into thinking I managed any of this with any sort of grace or intelligence. I bumbled around a fair bit, battling errors both obscure and infuriating. In the end the import completed without error. It also completed very quickly and with little data imported. I did a check and found the following:
- 0 subforums imported
- 0 messages imported
- 3 users imported
Well, the three users was something, at least. I checked them out and found one of them was me (yay) and the other two were spam accounts from 2012.
The year seems appropriate, somehow.
As of now I have a functioning if spartan Xenforo forum with a bunch of non-existent data imported from the downed database. It doesn’t seem like much given the hours I spent on this.
It was kind of fun working on it when I solved one dilemma and moved onto the next. It’s less fun to have nothing useful at the end to show for it.
But I have not given up yet! I have merely gone to bed. For now.
