Migrating from another forum

Open Admin → Import, pick your current platform, and enter your old forum’s database connection (host, database, username, password — and the table prefix for phpBB/vBulletin). The importer reads the source read-only; it never writes to it.

Hit Test connection to see how many members, categories, topics and posts will come across, then Start import. It runs in the background, so you can leave the page and come back — a progress bar and live counts show where it’s up to.

Forums/categories → categories, members → members, discussions/threads → topics, and replies → posts. Old formatting (BBCode, or Discourse’s rendered HTML) is converted to Convoro’s. Set your old forum’s URL to also bring over avatars and embedded images.

Members keep their passwords wherever the old hashes are portable (Flarum, XenForo, phpBB 3.1+). Where they aren’t (Discourse, vBulletin), members simply reset their password on first login.

The import dedupes by email and by a source-derived slug, so existing members, categories and topics are skipped rather than duplicated — you can run it again to pick up new content.

The Flarum importer is the most battle-tested; the XenForo, phpBB, Discourse and vBulletin importers are covered by automated mapping tests but every real forum differs slightly — back up your Convoro database first and review the result.