vB 4 migration Issue

Hi all, I'm going to be moving my forums from domain.com to forums.domain.com

vB 4 is already installed on forums.domain.com, and I have just abandoned ImpEx after I am informed, by Mert, that thread IDs will change - causing havoc.

I was originally going to upgrade via ImpEx to remove the unwanted (non-vB) tables from modifications and hacks etc.

Any ideas?

Can you not just change the folder that forum.domain.com points to instead of moving anything? In other words point it to your old domain.com folder on the server and just upgrade the existing installation of vbulletin.

The forum files are in the web root, public_html .

No one else to offer migration support? How should I deal with htaccess 301s? Obviously, I want to keep Google and other search engines on my side as possible through the migration.

as suggested, physically move the folder into the new location.

You can set 301 redirects, but it really depends on what you end up doing in root. You can't just redirect EVERYTHING from root to forums. subdomain, so there's needs to be more information provided on what's in root, and if you have a generic idetifier (like forums folder) that we can help you direct all.

Personally, I would suggest highly against doing this. Keeping vb in root, you can build everthing off of it, and with the power of vbseo, you can fake it to not have your forum be your homepage, and you can keep your fourms/threads in their current positions and not have any 301s to worry about in the first place.

The forum files are being physically moved. In the root, there will be a custom CMS using some sort of SEO, here is acopy of the .htaccess there:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z\-/]+)$ index.php?do=$1 [QSA]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} "/clients/"
RewriteRule (.*) $1 [L]

I am assuming 301 redirects will work for the forums? The forums are in the root themselves, so, hence:

orginal domain -> forums.domain.com
So for one of the forums:
/news-announcements/ -> forums.domain.com/news-announcements/
etc - how would I achieve this in htaccess?

Originally Posted by ct2k7

The forum files are in the web root, public_html .

Just change the folder where your current forum is hosted. And in ACP, change the url in which vbulletin READS your forum as, along with changing the image paths in style manager. Easy and simple as that.

I've done it before. When I changed the folder, the only things that weren't working is image filepaths. Which I had to go through ACP fixing.

Before renaming the folder, I had the server read forums.site.com on a certain folder - which is in public html root. Once done, all I did was erase the physical folder, as the server recognizes where the domain points in root. With this in mind, I was able to rename the old folder without hassle.

Originally Posted by Carlos SEO

Just change the folder where your current forum is hosted. And in ACP, change the url in which vbulletin READS your forum as, along with changing the image paths in style manager. Easy and simple as that.

I've done it before. When I changed the folder, the only things that weren't working is image filepaths. Which I had to go through ACP fixing.

There's a lot more than just the forum files in the root, that's the issue - again, how does this help?

All I'm doing is moving the vB 4 files to a folder called forum for ths subdomain, forums.domain.com, what I need to sort out is the 404s SE are going to get.

Oh. :( Alright. I wasn't any help.

No worries Carlos, gracias.

I've flagged this thread for oleg to provide some rewrite help.

The forum files are being physically moved. In the root, there will be a custom CMS using some sort of SEO, here is acopy of the .htaccess there:

Looks like your custom CMS already does rewrite all URLs in domain root, so the only option would be to add one domain per subforum to redirect them, right after "RewriteEngine on" line, like:

RewriteRule ^(news-announcements/.*) http://forums.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(other-subforum/.*) http://forums.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Thanks for confirming my limited knowledge (of htaccess and 301 and this)