ichigoBBS
/kuro_admin
v8.4 · est. 2003
posted by: kuro_admin · admin · 14y on this board
One click. Under 17 minutes. Threads, PMs, and attachments come with you.
Five legacy and centralized platforms ship with first-party importers in IchigoBBS 8.4. Each entry below lists the supported schema and the two or three caveats every admin hits.
caveat: vB 5.x CMS articles live in a separate table; import them with --include-cms.
caveat: phpBB extensions (e.g. Thanks mod) are not re-installed; their data maps into a custom field if present.
import from phpBB →caveat: XenForo 2.x add-ons (e.g. [bd] Attachment) may need their output re-rendered post-import.
import from XenForo →caveat: Discourse trust levels aren't a clean 1:1; we map them to a forum role called "trust-tier".
import from MyBB or Discourse →on a platform not listed? the importer is open — write a 30-line adapter and we'll merge it. read the adapter spec →
00:00 and 16:42.A vBulletin-to-IchigoBBS run on a 240k-post board, captured from a real admin's terminal log on a $6/mo Hetzner VPS.
SSH into the legacy host, run ichigo-migrate snapshot --source=vbulletin. The tool writes a portable .ichigo-bundle (schema + media + custom BBCode) to your workstation. Your source board stays live — no read-locks taken.
apt install ichigo-bbs-core on the target VPS. Brings PHP 8.3, MariaDB, and the migration CLI. The installer does not touch port 80 yet — your old forum is still answering traffic during this window.
ichigo-migrate import ./board.ichigo-bundle --dry-run. Prints a report: 240,118 threads, 11,402 PMs, 38.1 GB attachments, 47 custom BBCodes mapped. Nothing is written yet.
ichigo-migrate import ./board.ichigo-bundle --commit. Threads, users, PMs, attachments, ranks, mod logs all land in one transactional pass. ActivityPub identities re-broadcast at 15:30. At 16:42 you flip DNS to the new VPS. Old board is preserved read-only on a :8081 port for 30 days as your rollback.
Most migrations need zero configuration. The defaults — schema mapping, attachment hash verification, BBCode translation, user re-hash — are right for ~92% of boards we've seen since 2003. But when an admin does need to reach in, the importer exposes a small set of flags in /etc/ichigo/migrate.conf rather than a 200-field wizard.
The three that come up most: --dry-run prints a diff without writing (safe to re-run any number of times); --attach-hash=sha1|md5|none lets you skip verification on huge boards where you've already proven your source storage is intact; and --ap-rebroadcast=on|first-login|off controls when the ActivityPub bridge re-announces each user's identity to the fediverse — by default, immediately at cutover, but admins who federate slowly often prefer first-login so the bridge warms up gradually as members return.
Custom BBCode is the one thing that occasionally requires a human. vBulletin's [QUOTE=...] and XenForo's nested [USER] tags map cleanly; forum-specific markup (think: a bespoke [spoiler] from 2007) lands as plain text with a single-line log entry telling you which tag set to add to migrate.bbcode.d/. The translation file is plain JSON — no compiled plugin chain, no restart required.
If the importer hits an error it cannot resolve — a corrupt attachment row, a malformed UTF-8 username, a truncated PM folder — it logs the row, skips it, and continues. The run still completes; you get a migrate-report.json listing every skipped row with its row ID and the specific reason. Most admins fix the handful of edge cases in a follow-up 90-second pass.
No. The old board stays live on its original host for the entire 17-minute window. DNS only flips at 16:42, after the import has committed. The shortest observed downtime in our 2024 benchmarks was 9 seconds — the time it took DNS to propagate to the new VPS.
IchigoBBS auto-generates 301 redirects from your old thread URLs to the new permalinks the moment the import commits. We've tested this on boards with 1.2M indexed threads — Search Console shows link equity transferring within 48 hours with no measurable ranking drop.
They come over. The importer re-hashes every file against the target's storage layer and writes a SHA-1 manifest. If even one byte mismatches, that file is flagged in the report and re-fetched from the source before the run completes.
Yes. After import, your old board is preserved read-only on a separate port for 30 days. One command — ichigo-migrate rollback — restores DNS to the source host. No data is destroyed on either side until you explicitly purge the rollback buffer.