They must be crazy , vbulletin dont allow you to download their importer scrips , instead you are to submit the data to them to be converted.

I dont know if they even considered this , but within the uk the moment anyone presses the submit button they are breaking UK Data Proctection Act laws.

To get round the law - you would have to get written consent from every member on the database to do this. Ok a site of 30 members - fairly ok.

A site of 300 or more - a nightmare.
I cant belive they have done this. They seem to be making more mistakes by the day.

Just my opinion folks.

Tranferring database info to Jelsoft for any reason I am certain will violate the privacy & security policies of many of their customers.

Vampire, got any proof of your claim, exactly?

I hardly see how it would break such a law, as all I can come up with are tons of examples in which the same would apply, that people are already doing anyway (including you).

Under UK law Data that contains information about a person is protected under the Data Proctection Act 1984. Transfer of this data to a third party is illegal.

To give an example. I worked in a govement data center were data was processed by us from local councils. But we took on a new council as a client. In order of us to process their data we had to physicly take their very very old ICL 39 and house it in the datacenter as if we wanted to house the data in our Trimetra we would have had to go though a lot of legal issues.

Also another example - My isp brought a website about them from a user & employed them, loads of legal contracts were drawn up especially about the vbulletin database. Recenly the user left ntl because of issues he has with his employer.
Now due to the nature of the contract all data upto the time of sale is his , however all data after the sale is NTL's and there is a long legal battle about the data.

At this time the site has been started again with a fresh database. But the database was an issue in the data protection act & as far as i know is still going on now.

Under UK law Data that contains information about a person is protected under the Data Proctection Act 1984. Transfer of this data to a third party is illegal.
Then you're effectively forbidden to run a vBulletin, as it contains information about a person that you're sharing to a million-and-one third parties by having it be publicly available.

Depending on how you customize your vBulletin, everything about a user can be visible, publicly, except for their hashed password and salt. How is that not in violation of that law, then? It's ok to make it public on the internet but not to send it to a server for import into a different system?

you got me there. I dont know.
I know passwords are one of the areas that are proctected. And me i make sure e-mail address's arnt shown. It's upto the user if they make e-mail address's public or not.

I am going to have to look into this further. Not that i have the time lol

With all due respect, the potential for the exploitation of information contained in a database is a real concern for many.

I am not saying that Jelsoft would or could choose to exploit this information in any manner. But, what I am saying is that the perceived potential is something that is simply not going to be acceptable to many corporate and most all government entities.

Of course, this is Jelsoft's decision, not mine (thank God!); however, it will eliminate many potential conversions to vB. If they do not need the income then this policy is a great idea. Otherwise, it seems IMHO that this "service" should more wisely be optional rather than mandatory.

To that extent, I still think Jelsoft should make a compromise for large companies / government entities - have Jelsoft perform the ImpEx sequence on the server itself, so that no database has to be sent back and forth, while at the same time keeping the scripts in Jelsoft's hands only.