Beverly asked the questions I had! Also, delighted to stay sweet 16.

Things should quiet down for me shortly and I'll be able to test and participate more. Thank you again, Gud! Your efforts are very much appreciated. Brendon will test the new user function when that is an option!

As usual, I haven't had a lot of time, but I've migrated users and thread metadata successfully and I'm attempting to migrate 1.8 million posts right now. It's been a slow process since I've had make a bunch of fixes to get things to migrate, but so far this migrate run is looking good. If it works, I'll update the beta site.

This won't be the last step. I'll still need to migrate bookmarks, blocked users, and thread subscriptions. But it will let people test out things w/ migrated content (albeit about a month old).

I hope my script was helpful.

It was. Thanks.

Beta site is going to be offline for awhile. Trying out thread migration.

Beta site it back. It feels a lot more real populated with a bunch of data.

Some caveats: Migration is not finished, so this is just testing stuff out. Current positions in threads, subscriptions, bookmarks, and blocked users are not migrated at this stage. The database was reset so if you already had an account on the beta site it was deleted. Since user data is migrated, you can log in with your regular buffista login but you will immediately be required to reset your account in order to have a secure password hash. (You don't need to reset with a different password, but the site can't just migrate password hashes so the process needs to be manual even if the password doesn't change). The site is at beta.buffistas.com

Taking a quick look, I was able to log in successfully.

You didn't use the part in my code where it tries to determine if a text field is UTF-8 or CP-1252, at least for usernames. So, for example, ita's username is "§ ita §".

You also didn't use the part where it attempts to translate internal links from "showthread.php?..." to "/read/...", like here.

Also, any link inside a post that was manually coded by the user as "<a href=" is screwed up, like here.

Inline links are displayed as [link] over here, which I liked a lot, but it isn't done over there.

Also, I see the name of the Sang Sacré thread is wrong.

Thanks for checking it out.

Yeah, there are a number of bugs to fix and there are some more parts of the perl script I need to translate over to my ruby migration script. I totally overlooked a couple of things I probably should have tried to get into this test.

Overall, I feel pretty good about this first test. It didn't take very long to go from the b.org database to the beta database. The tricky part is that the generated seed file was too bit to load in one go on the VM so I broke it up into 265 seed files and ran them sequentially.

I'm hoping that having a bunch of content on the beta board now will make trying it out easier. Registering as a brand new user is also perfectly functional.

If any admins want to edit/create static pages (FAQs, Etiquette, How-To, etc...) on the beta site, feel free to do so. I can save them off before the next database reset. It's in the 'Pages' section of the Admin Portal.

New feature on the beta board. If you go to your profile settings and select 'View' you can turn on the left sidebar. The left sidebar will disappear when the browser window gets too small for it.