Importing is fairly easy to do. You do need shell (telnet/ssh) access to the server to run the script (there is an exception, more on that a little later). If you go into the admin/tools directory, you should see an 'import.pl' script. If you run this script (eg. perl import.pl) then it will give you the available options, and a few examples. Before you do perform you import, you'll want to configure Gossamer Forum first, and make sure it's running properly. It's also expected that the forum you're importing from is operational.

Typical options for a UBB import would be:

Note that --clear-database will clear out your existing users and posts in Gossamer Forum. You can remove this option if you don't want to do this. If you have users who have already registered for Gossamer Forum using their username that was in UBB, you might want to use the --append-data option.

The --close-forums option will close both Gossamer Forum and UBB.

Lastly, the --add-bad-email option will add any users who have an invalid email (ie. email's which are formatted wrong, such as "this is an invalid email address"). Their account will be disabled and their email will be set to 'invalid@email.address'. You can do a search in the admin to find these users and enable/fix their accounts.

Adrian