Why is VW3 to VW4 still so buggy 11 months after release?

[Alfa1]

I'm a little surprised that 11 months after VW4 was released the upgrade/import process is still not smooth and I encountering small things like missing phrases to fatal errors. Its less buggy than 11 months ago, but still seems problematic.

I would like to upgrade my big board to VW4 without data loss or corruption.
But I am worried about this.

[pegasus]

Every time a new feature is added or tweaked, it affects things in an importer. It is often difficult to discover what effects there might be when imports are usually one-time events that most people don't have a need for. And especially with imports, the more time that goes by, fewer people are going to need it, because if they ever needed it, they imported before the changes.

Combine that with the fact that most people encountering a bug simply won't report it, and you will find that many underused portions of software are generally more buggy than those that see high use.

A few months ago we saw a relatively change in the way BB-Codes are stored in memory and it seems like this made some aspects of the import process unstable again. However, despite the errors, this should have little effect on the quality of an import for users whose destination databases have not renamed any BB-Codes yet.

[Alfa1]

Just checking: some time ago you advised to migrate from VW3 to VW4 on vb3 and then migrate to XF. The rationale was that this would result in less issues than a direct import.
Are you still advising the same? Or better go from vb+vw3 to xf+vw4?

[pegasus]

If there are bugs in the VW3 importer, they will be there regardless. But I think I was referring to a couple of things:

- When the source database and destination database are the same, there is less room for user error -- you don't have to specify paths to attachments (and potentially set the wrong path) for example.
- But mainly, there is less to debug if something does go wrong (you've only changed the wiki software, rather than both the wiki and the forum simultaneously).
- At the time I said that, it's possible I had not finished the VW3 importer to make it compatible with XF, or I had only just finished it.
- I expected more bugs in the XF version of the VW3 importer than in the vB version. That's a hard thing to measure, but I think I still feel that way. There have been more use cases of the VW3 importer where users still kept vBulletin, than those who imported directly to XF. On the other hand, using two steps means that you will also have to deal with any bugs in the VW4 importer. I did and still do expect very few breaking issues here, because basically nothing happens in this import except direct copying. But things like user IDs and BB-Codes need to be mapped.

I always expect the worst during an import. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised, but I feel like the importer will always be in a beta status. You'll notice that XenForo devs say the same about theirs. The truth is, not many people do imports, and things like the query design of SHOWTHREADS, an under-used feature, in a now under-used platform version, and how that affects the importer's ability to complete a step, can easily go unnoticed. There's so much variety in the data they can bring over, it's extremely difficult to accomodate everything with limited availability of test cases.