[intricatic]

What fun we've been having. So far: vblogetin has caused a big problem with the upgrade, so we had to get rid of it and replace it with vbulletin's native blog software. Consequentially, the import script for the blog software doesn't work.

Otherwise, the upgrade went without a hitch, except for the obvious and expected absence of images due to the conversion. What happened was that, last night, at about 1-2am (or so, I can't even remember), I had the upgrade finished on the forum side and was preparing to call it complete. My initial plan was to wait a week or so before upgrading the blog software so everyone could backup their posts if they so desired. After changing the collation on all the tables, I thought everything was going smoothly, and the forum software upgraded easily enough. Once I turned the forum on, the post table became corrupted and the site was inaccessible until I imported a backup database, which I had initially made before changing the collation of all the tables on the database by hand. As a result, some 8 hours of work went down the drain in a matter of seconds.

This is when I realized that vbulletin had a script, called Impex, that handled conversion of collation on a table-by-table basis, and supposedly was able to import vblogetin tables over to vBBlog. So, to make a long story short, instead of opting to hand collate the tables in the database a second time, which was excruciating and annoying the first time around, I decided Impex would be the more practical solution. In the end, it was the more practical solution, as well, but it does cost some convenience - in terms of the blogs which are now lost in my backup databases, and the image files which are mysteriously vanished. This is the reason I didn't want to start with that option - if I could get the database back to an optimal state in terms of necessary collation changes, then I could avoid having to deal with all those stupid problems. Unfortunately, I simply don't have the time to go line by line through a 245 table database and change every single entry within each table to utf-8, twice... I can't imagine anyone who has that kind of time.

All in all, I think it was a success, considering we've upgraded the entire server in a matter of two days, and rebuilt the forum with a much more advanced platform (vBulletin 3.7.1 with Project Tools and vBBlog).

At this point, I'm exhausted. Timothy helped out a lot over the last day to get things stable on the forum-side, and the only things that need to be fixed now are minor aesthetic issues. We'll have the themes restored after working out which themes will conflict with the software, and which will not, and we'll have the emoticons back soon, since we have all the emoticons in a folder on the server.

If anyone has any questions about the software, I'll do my best to answer, but I'm still playing around with it, myself.