Fuck This Shit

CAINE is depending solely on me to migrate the forums from lulzbb to Simple Machines.  I honestly thought I could do it.  Really.  So here's the history of CAINE's forums, as they pertain to the migration.  No dates, because I forget them.

We decided we needed forums, so our webmaster (the person with access to CAINE's account on the student webserver) bartered for some storage space and installed phpbb 3.  It didn't work out.  I found a free web host with PHP and MySQL and set up phpbb2, because phpbb3 wouldn't install on the server.  That took off.  Then we figured that having a real domain name would be better than something like "caine.freelinuxhost.com" or whatever it was (doesn't exist any more, I let my account expire).  L eventually bought us desudesudesu.org, where the forums are now housed.

L and I, both being into programming, immediately started hacking apart phpbb2 and making it fit our needs more.  I focused on mainly stupid shit, like coloring usernames according to access level (i.e. administrators, moderators, and regular users all had different colors) and dicking around with the theme until it looked like 4chan.  I was a lot more of a /b/tard back then than I am now.

One of the most useful hacks was image posting.  Forum activity really took off when we could upload a picture alongside a post.  We're currently on the third iteration of the RANDOM PICTURE THREAD, which gets closed when it reaches 100 pages.

L, fed up with how much shit phpbb2 is (I'll back him up, it really is a pile of shit unlike most software he calls shit), wrote a drop-in replacement called lulzbb that we've been using to this day.  Then, kind of like 4scrape, he abandoned it.  I've been the only person working on it for quite some time now.  I wrote the private messaging feature.  I improved L's in-place editing code to have a cancel button and be protected from clicking edit more than once.  Eventually I found that L had written mod controls but hadn't integrated them into the site, so I did that.

The boards still to this day lack many features, such as an admin panel, bug-free in-place post editing (certain characters will prevent a post from being edited, I haven't figured it out), bbcode buttons (the posting area is just a large text box, I get the feeling that the newer users don't really know that bbcode even exists.  The wordfilters we have, while funny, fuck with posts in weird ways on occasion.  We also need a post preview feature and other essential forum features.

So, it came up.  I had wanted to do this immediately when we got the domain, but I don't know why I didn't do it then, it would have been much easier.  We want to migrate the forums from the piece of shit we're running to something polished with features we've been lacking and the ability to expand as the userbase needs.  There's a lot of forum software out there, frankly most of it is shit.  I was a fan of Invision Power Boards until they went to a pay model.  Since then, I've taken a liking to Simple Machines.  A couple other members also liked it, so I decided we'd migrate to that.

I had preservation on my mind, so I made bold promises left and right about posts, forum structure, PMs, user accounts, and so forth being carried over.  I'd known that existing conversion scripts probably wouldn't work due to the sheer modifications we'd made to the database, and the total frontend replacement going from phpbb to lulzbb, so I said I'd write one for the purpose.

That was before the end of the spring semester.  It's July 12th.  I've done quite a lot of delving through SMF's database, comparing it to lulzbb's, and correlating fields.  SMF's database is understandably a lot larger and more involved.  It stores a lot of information that lulzbb's doesn't.  Conversion is no easy task.  I thought I was up to the challenge.  It's not looking that way.  Things I have to resolve pop up left and right.  I momentarily thought we were in the clear when while leafing through SMF's source I discovered that it allows you to log in with a password hash from a lot of other competing forum software.  It even converts the stored hash to its own format once that's successful.  It looked awesome.  It really did.

But going through, everything else just kept getting more and more complex with every step I took.  I no longer feel like I can write a migration script to convert lulzbb to SMF.  So, in vain, I tried SMF's existing phpbb2 converter, knowing full well it probably wouldn't work.  Indeed, it didn't.  It couldn't even start.

So now, I'm thinking the best option is to set the existing lulzbb forums to read-only, then wipe the main domain (www.desudesudesu.org) and install SMF there and just start the fuck over.  I'm tired of editing code and looking through database tables.  Under this plan, the old forums would still be accessible in read-only format on dev.desudesudesu.org.

Only problem: I don't own the domain.  I don't have access to the account that the domain is hosted on.  I have write access to the development side via group permissions.  That's it.  I'll need access to the account to set up SMF.  I don't have the money to take over ownership from L.  SMF also FTPs into itself to change file permissions when you install a mod, something I view as kind of strange but don't really know the alternative to, save for setting every single source file and directory to be world-writable.

I've been doing migration testing on my server that's sitting nearby my desktop.  Due to various issues mostly related to Arch Linux, any time I try to install something, things break.  This means I can't fully test SMF.  It's kind of a moot point, but it aggravates me that I can't seem to get all the components of a fucking web server installed and configured properly.  Also, recently I tried to update PHP, everything broke, and I had to downgrade it to get it working again.

tl;dr I'm very sorry, CAINE, but I can't do this.  I feel kind of like a dead man walking on the forums right now.  I talk big but can't back up my words with actions.  I hate making promises I can't keep, but it seems like I've done that this time.  The forum migration everyone has been waiting for isn't possible with me at the helm.  lulzbb is too different from phpbb and SMF.