@ pyragony54

It seems that you are basing your decision not to convert your forum to SMF at least in part on a misunderstanding about SQL databases: there is no 128 MB cap on their size. It is possible, however, that your hosting provider has imposed such a limit.

A few years ago, I moved my website and forum from a web hosting provider to my own virtual private server (VPS) running cPanel to avoid what I considered an unreasonable restriction (the blocking of visitors using the Tor network). The monthly cost is modest (about €30 per month), and I'm very glad now to have full control over size quotas and other limitations.

Before converting my forum from YaBB to SMF, I was encountering an issue that perhaps could be addressed in YaBB 2.7: the forum index would frequently become corrupted, which would result in some forum pages becoming inaccessible, and the list of recent posts would instead display very old posts. I would have to rebuild the forum index every few days.

I have noted a few advantages of SMF over YaBB with my own forum. Perhaps the most important is that the forum is now "mobile-responsive" and is easily readable on a smartphone. I've also been able to use an SMF mod (Optimus) to help optimize the forum for search engines. I also had Claude AI Opus 4.7 write a modification of the default SMF template to implement microdata tags to make message threads eligible for Google's Search's "rich results."

I imagine it would be possible to do all these things in YaBB 2.7 as well, and the AI tools you're using would presumably facilitate that.

I wish you many more years of health and happiness! (I'm 62 myself.)

One more thing about the conversion script that I mentioned earlier in this thread: it has a bug that causes regular users to be unable to post messages. Claud AI's Opus 4.7 helped me to quickly troubleshoot and fix the problem on my own forum, but the conversion script I've linked to on my website (georgemaschke [dot] net) still has the bug. Here is a summary that Claude generated for me:

Quote:

@ pyragony54

I wish you and your colleagues all success with YaBB 2.7!

Perhaps an advanced AI model could help with troubleshooting any bugs you're encountering.

As I noted in an update to my blog post, there may be an issue with conversion of private messages. One thing to look for is how well the senders and recipients are converted. I had issues with incoming PMs wrongly indicating the recipient to also be the sender, and with outgoing PMs wrongly indicating the sender to be the recipient. I thought I had this issue sorted, but it seems that the final version still had such problems, at least for some PMs.

Pretty much everything else seems to have carried over pretty well. Unfortunately, SMF doesn't have the equivalent of YaBB's highlight tag (of which I was fond), so highlighted text will simply become bold text in SMF.

Since I cannot post attachments, I direct readers to my personal website, where you will find a post about the YaBB to SMF conversion scripts that includes a download link. See the post dated 4 May 2026 on my personal website, georgemaschke [dot] net.

Quote:

Cool

Although I haven't been here in a long time, I'd like to add my two cents.

I was furious when I finished the complete translation for YaBB 2.7 and it still wasn't released. That was hours of work for nothing. But anyway. I can probably rightfully claim to run the largest YaBB forum today. Over 60,000 topics with around 480,000 posts and about 850 forums and subforums are quite impressive. YaBB 2.6.12 is still running stably and quickly.

You just need decent nameservers, and I'm using Cloudflare. There are still two or three minor bugs. For example, I recently discovered that newer posts can't be appended to older ones. The window doesn't load completely. Strangely, this error only occurs very rarely. I simply reverse the process by placing the old post before the new one or copying it directly from the server. That works, albeit awkwardly. This bug should be fixed. An upgrade to Debian 13 is coming up soon, and I hope Perl doesn't cause any problems. So far, Perl updates have always gone smoothly. We, or rather a friend of mine, have also created a sitmap generator, which I actually wanted to publish here. But for whom? Nothing's happening with it anymore. Anyone interested is welcome to have it. Perhaps there's still room for improvement. Maybe we'll even finish YaBB 2.7. I don't know if it will be completed. I might also do the German translation for YaBB 2.6.12 (it's actually finished), I just need to reverse it. We'll see if I still have the energy for it. I'd switch to SMF, but there doesn't seem to be a usable conversion program, and archiving is simply impossible.

@ Dandello

Let's at least fix the bugs, and that's that. Then YaBB can run for many more years.


In German

Ich war zwar auch schon lange nicht mehr hier, möchte aber abschließend auch meinen Senf dazugeben.
Stinksauer war ich, als ich als ich die vollständige Übersetzung für YaBB 2.7 fertig hatte und sie dann doch nicht erschien. Das waren Stunden an Arbeit für nichts. Aber egal. Mit Recht kann ich wohl heute behaupten, das wohl größte YaBB-Forum zu betreiben. Über 60000 Themen mit über rund 480000 Beiträgen und rund 850 Foren und Unterforen sind wohl als enorm zu betrachten. YaBB 2.6.12 läuft immer noch stabil und schnell.
Man braucht nur anständige Nameserver wobei ich hier Cloudflare verwende. Zwei bis drei kleine Bugs sind noch vorhanden. So habe ich vor kurzem festgestellt, dass neuere Beiträge nicht an alte anfügen lassen. Das Fenster baut nicht vollständig auf. Dieser Fehler kommt komischerweise nur sehr selten vor. Ich drehe das ganze einfach um, indem ich den alten Beitrag einfach vor den neuen setze oder kopiere direkt vom Server. Das funktioniert, wenn auch umständlich. Diesen Bug sollte man noch beheben. Demnächst steht ein upgrade auf Debian 13 an und ich hoffe, dass PERL keine Probleme macht. Bisher liefen die PERL-updates immer problemlos. Wir haben auch, bzw ein Freund von mir, hat einen Sitmapgenerator gebastelt, den ich eigentlich hier veröffentlichen wollte. Aber für wen? Es passiert ja nichts mehr. Wer Interesse daran hat, kann ihn gerne haben. Vielleicht kann man auch noch einiges verbessern. Vielleicht werden wir noch YaBB 2.7 fertigstellen. Ob er es schafft, weiß ich nicht. Vielleicht werde ich noch für YaBB 2.6.12 die deutsche Übersetzung machen (sie ist eigentlich fertig), ich muß sie nur rückabwickeln. Mal sehen, ob ich noch Lust dazu habe. Ich würde ja auf SMF umsteigen, aber ein brauchbares Konvertierungsprogramm scheint es nicht zu geben und eine Archivierung ist einfach nicht möglich.

@ Dandello

lasse uns wenigstens die Bugs beheben und gut ist es. Dann kann YaBB noch viele Jahre laufen.

You know I often sit back and wonder what happened to everyone that was involved in the creation of YaBB back from the early 2000’s.

There were some amazing developers and mod writers many of them who helped me out along the way in the early days.

When it first appeared YaBB was amazing.  The concept still is and I know my forum has the most expansive knowledge of of Australian Camp Oven History.

I am 73 now and I guess I will keep persevering until I can no longer or I guess until YaBB will no longer run on the newer updated versions of perl.

Good to hear from you Dandello.

A real lack of posts for many months on here.

Is YABB still alive?  I know my little forum is still struggling along.  It seems Facebook and all those other social media’s have taken over.