Think twice about moving media heavy sites to UNA

After weeks and weeks of building, hours and hours of testing not to mention hundred of dollars, I have just discovered the Dolphin to UNA migration will not work if you have more than 1000 members and 10 media files.  I kid you not. It would seem that Boonex /Una Inc employed a 2 year old to code this migration tool. 

Here’s what they don’t tell you about migration:

1.       They cannot guarantee what will actually migrate. In the three test migrations I performed using the exact same clone of my site, each one ended up with wildly different numbers records in many tables.

2.       Migrating a 8000 member site will take you 48hours + We’re still running here after 48 hours.

3.       The migration will stop but you have no idea if it has or not.  It may even eat up all your server resources (I have an over spec’d dedicated server) and crash Apache.

4.       Media is not fully converted during migration.  Photos and Videos will only show the file name and no placeholder or thumbnail until the user clicks the filename. Only then is the file fully converted.  This means that your albums module just shows up a load of blank albums. Same for the timeline.  It gets better though; each photo takes a good 60 seconds to process and only 10 files can be processed at a time.  Let’s do the maths.  I have 20,000 photos each taking 1 minute to convert = 333.33 Hours! OK so divide that by 10 conversions that can be run at the same time = 33.33 Hours or 1.38 Days.  But let’s face it what user is going to wait that long?  Two weeks into launching on UNA your memberships will have wasted away to nothing.

5.       Finally, you get no support.  Not that this will come as a shock. Instead you end up paying a contractor to get you out of the shit (Thanks Geek_Girl).  The best you can hope for is you messages to support may or may not be responded to within a week but only to say that this must be your fault.

So there you have it.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you want to migrate to UNA.

Thank you for your report. It shows again, that we (the old dolphin users) no longer important.

great info, serskine.

There is also the realization that it will not transfer anything from pkForum. I assume that it would transfer the orca forum. Problem is that each of these used different database and so if one has pkForum, the migration tool just will ignore it.

One sector which the migration tool seems to handle efficiently is the blogs.

If anyone has any experience doing pkForum migration either to the forum (discussions) for UNA or the orca at Dolphin, I would appreciate to hear from that person. I considered using phpmyadmin to copy over database but that may be problematic is the tables were designed differently. Has anyone tried that?

I do not know if it makes a different but it may be sensible to use an ethernet cable from the router if one is doing this at a server, that would be instead of using wifi. For any protracted download or file transfers, a direct cable to the router may make the difference. This also applies to backups from a server to a home computer.

@MyBeloved, I thought pkForum went out with button up boots. Is it still available and does it still work with 7.3.5 - 7.4.0?

I am using pkForum with 7.3.5 but I am doing a trial of UNA and want to move over the database, some of it, any portion of it that can be moved to the forum of UNA which is called Discussions, it seems.

I figure that it must be possible to do that using phpmyadmin so long as dolphin and UNA are on the same server.

It is a fact thought that pkForum is done because I heard from Paul O that they are not going to do anything more with it.

There is or was a migration tool from orca to pkForum. That has to mean that there is similarities in the way the tables are formed in the database. So to reverse that to move from pkForum to orca should be possible and then what is moved to orca can be moved with the Una migration tool over the UNA.

I am sure I am not the only person stuck with this.

You may need to consider a reverse migration back to Orca first if that's possible. Migration tools can sometimes manipulate the DB fields.

I don't want to hijack thread so I've PMed you.

I asked in the una.io forum about how the migration process was set up technically and got no answer.  I pointed out that the response did not answer my question so maybe they will let us know more about the migration process.

UNA has a different database structure; the profile thing is not straight forward.  You join a UNA site but you haven't really joined.  Once you join, you have to create a profile; either person or organisation.  So just that is a winkle that you have to iron out; so to migrate a profile you have to first read the profile and then create an account on the UNA site.  Then you need to create a person profile; then you need to read in the profile data from Dolphin and populate the person profile.  Albums are done differently on UNA as well.

Someone may write a better migration script later; maybe even Boonex.  At this time though, Boonex needs to be quite clear about the process and what can be migrated and what can't.  Be upfront and transparent so people don't just leap blindly and possibly trash their sites.

In fact, I've seen your story here:

https://una.io/page/view-discussion?id=2243

What I can't believe is that there are so many photos "1804819507" on your website!

In the dolphins, each uploaded photo is converted into 5 thumbnails. plus the original photo, there's going to be 6 files for one uploaded photo.

        $this->aFilesConfig = array (
            'icon' => array('postfix' => '_ri.jpg', 'size_def' => 32, 'square' => true),
            'thumb' => array('postfix' => '_rt.jpg', 'size_def' => 64, 'square' => true),
            'browse' => array('postfix' => '_t.jpg', 'size_def' => 240, 'square' => true),
        	'browse2x' => array('postfix' => '_t_2x.jpg', 'size_def' => 480, 'square' => true),
            'file' => array('postfix' => '_m.jpg', 'size_def' => 600),
            'original' => array('postfix' => '.{ext}'),
        );

Although I just only have 159,053 photo files, I don't want to convert to a special photo file for UNA.

I plan to redesign the Photos module that can be used in UNA. continue to use .jpg without converting to a special format.

The figures quoted in the that post on Una.io is what the maigration tool quotes.  As far as I can see this is a totally random number.  Its true I do have a large site over 8000 members at 20,000 photos but that is only an average of 2.5 photos per member.

Looks like we have found the limit of Una or at least the developers.

I thought we decided UNA was a joke a long time ago.

:(

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Michel - Meta-Travel.com
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Got a noticed in email that UNA now has permissions control; the same that Dolphin has had for some time.  Imagine moving a site to UNA before the new permissions control and finding out that your members were not restrained.  Oh well.