No, we haven’t forgotten about the conversion and we’re still actively working on the conversion script to get it right. One of the problems we have noticed is that our database is nearly full again due to a non-optimized data structure in MySQL. So we’ve taken the site offline for about an hour to run the optimization queries.

ETA 1 hour.

Edit: It’s been an hour and it’s still running.

Finally picked up some speed, we’ve done about 0.8M topics today.

Looks like we won’t be able to finish pruning today. We’re still a far way away from finishing and, as we’ve had to slow down the script considerably to reduce the impact it has on the performance of the forum, we won’t finish pruning for a while.

The script that we talked about yesterday has been working brilliantly. After a day, we’ve finished pruning roughly 1.6 to 2 million topics from the Graveyard. We expect to do more pruning today (in a few hours’ time) and we should be finished by tomorrow.

We’ve just finished writing a pruning script that is a huge improvement over the previous one found in phpBB2. This script will run in the background with a decrease in the impact it’ll have on the serverload while running. This should help us with pruning over the week to come.

Conversion #1 is the first post in a series of posts to the blog comprising the chronicles of converting from phpBB2 to phpBB3 (also know as WBB3). As discussed in the topic (phpBB3 Conversion Begins Soon), the conversion will happen soon. I can confirm that it will not happen in the next 28 hours, but it will occur in roughly 13 days’ time as there are still a few last minute tasks that we must do in order to have a smooth conversion.

In the mean time, as we prepare for the conversion downtime, our Admins will perform prunes of topics in the Graveyard to minimize the number of topics we must convert over to WBB3. We will aim to have this done during off peak hours when our servers have most capacity, though we cannot say for certain that it will occur exactly during off-peak hours because it depends on the rate of pruning and whether or not we can meet our target of pruning nearly 4 million topics within 13 days’ time.

Please note that this is a conversion, almost all data will be retained in the process (e.g. all posts, all users, etc. is completely safe). Where we will lose some data is where some small and insignificant features are not yet implemented in WBB3 and such data will be discarded. For example, the saved options for whether or not to show the Wadio bar will not be kept because it is not implemented in WBB3, as we don’t think it is a feature worth having.

More posts to follow.