I recently, yesterday in fact, bought a database to vbnt.org a general discussion forum. It isn’t a large community. It’s perfect to start with though. It has 539 members and a little over 7,000 posts. The database was from a vbulletin 3.8.5 forum so I decided to use vbulletin 4 for this forum although I won’t rule out a future switch to IPB. I had bought the domain vbnt.net on speculation I would get the data. Turns out I got lucky there.

There was some forums and posts in the database that had to cleaned. I lost a couple hundred posts doing this so it wasn’t bad. I deleted all the subscriber forums which were the ones with the bad posts. The post contained warez and porn. While this is and will remian a general forum warez and porn is a no go for me.

The steps I took to get the site up and running took some time. There were hacks installed that caused 500 errors. I added back the hacks that caused the most problems. Once I was able to get the forum loaded I registered a new account. Then I used the tools.php to give that new account admin access. Once I did that I took over the main admin account and demoted all the old staff. Not to say I won’t bring them back. It’s just I don’t know them yet. Hopefully they will come back and once again become staff members.

Then I cleaned all the bad posts and reshuffled the forums. It was late so I called it a night.

This morning I finished the cleanup and optimization, added a default skin and came here to post this announcement. There are still some things to be done. I want to add a gallery, vbgallery since I have 2 unused licenses, an arcade and install vbexpierence again since it was part of the old site.

Without further ado I give you vBnt – General Forums.

The ste