==CHATAREA TO SMF/phpBB CONVERSION INSTRUCTIONS==
[To convert to a different forum software, modify members_topics_posts.py accordingly]
Before you begin, make some settings that will improve conversion (if you don't, conversion may randomly fail and/or crash!):
In your Control Panel -> Modify Profile page, change the options to these values:
View Other Members Signatures: No (signatures won't load on member pages, and on regular pages they serve only to break conversion -- i.e. signatures are NOT converted)

Log in to every password-protected forum on your ChatArea board.

You're set.

==REQUIRED STUFF==
A Web Server with [preferably] MySQL.
Forum Software installed on this web server, configured and ready to go. SMF is recommended for a variety of minor reasons, but anything else will do (when/if people write the backends for them, or you could do that yourself; see notes in the .py scripts)
Database Access - need to be able to INSERT and TRUNCATE (usually available with most hosts)
Python (versions 2.4 to 2.6 will work, but Python 3 will NOT work!) -- download from http://www.python.org
**N.B. Read all comments in settings.py to understand what each setting does! Setting bad settings may result in a poor quality conversion (missing stuff), a broken board, or no conversion at all.

=FORUM STRUCTURE=
1) Just create new forums and categories in whatever forum software you will be using. Please note the ID corresponding to each board.

=POSTS AND TOPICS=
2) Change some settings in settings.py (edit the file)
	table_prefix
		When you set up your forum software, what prefix did you use (default will depend on the exact software used; it's usually the product name plus an underscore; phpBB_ or smf_)
	CA_BOARDS
		Since ChatArea identifies forums by a long numeric ID while all other forum software uses small numbers, this variable maps ChatArea forum IDs onto your forum's new IDs. When you created each new forum/board in your forum software, an ID was created for it. Map ChatArea IDs to SMF IDs here.
	COOKIEDATA
		Get this by entering this into the address bar while viewing any page in your ChatArea forum:
			javascript:document.cookie
		and copying the entire text of the page that appears.
		The COOKIEDATA line should look like
			COOKIEDATA='<Cookie Data retrieved from the prompt message>'
		with the single quotes around your data.
	SOCNAME
		Your society's name (usually whatever comes after chatarea.com/ in the URL)
	URL
		The part of the URL preceding your society name. The default should be correct.
	[[Member settings]]
	RANDOMNUMBER
		a randomly chosen number used to generate member passwords, so they stay the same from run to run.
	postgroup
		Definitions for postgroups, IDs as in SMF.
	ADMINS
		a set/list of the Admin user IDs (as they are in ChatArea). This allows the script to correctly set up the admin users.
		To find out a user ID, note the URL of the member's profile: http://www.chatarea.com/MyForum.profile12345, where 12345 is the user ID.
3) Run the members_topics_posts.py Python script (Windows: double click it; *nix use "python members_topics_posts.py" as a command)
4) Import the SQL batch file topics_posts.sql to the forum database using the "latin1", "iso8859-1" or "cp1252" character set (encoding)
5) Import the SQL batch file members.sql to the forum database using the "latin1", "iso8859-1" or "cp1252" character set (encoding)
6) To notify members of the new passwords (randomly generated), run the pm_passwords.py file (configuring settings.py first to suit your needs).
	[in settings.py]
	waittime
		Time to wait (in seconds) between successive PMs. Admins can set this to zero.
		pm_passwords.py will produce errors and quit if it detects that the timeout is too short.
		n.b. it appears that ChatArea has no wait time. If this is the case, set this to 0.
	msgtitle
		The title of the personal message to send
	msgbody
		The text in the personal message. %s is the password (use this only once!)
		If you must use a % sign for any reason, place two of them (%%), only one will show up in the PM. Failure to do so will result in a failed script run!
7) Find and repair any errors, Recount all forum totals and statistics (both in Admin/ Forum Maintainance) for SMF. This causes SMF to correctly integrate the new posts and topics.
=FINAL TOUCHES=
Make sure to set your forum permissions correctly.
Manually add any moderators, themes or other settings.

=BUGS/INCOMPLETE CONVERSION NOTES
-No Attachments
-No Polls
-No special membergroups (admins specified in the ADMIN variable get member group 1, all others 0)
-No signatures
-No calendar
