I recently solved the challenge of converting a 25-year-old YaBB message board that I administer to Simple Machines Forum (SMF). The task was at first daunting because there was no currently-working off-the-shelf solution for doing this. Moreover, I am not a computer programmer. I don’t know how to code in Perl or PHP.

However, by “vibe coding” with Claude AI’s Opus 4.7 model, I was able to adapt the code from two older conversion scripts that the SMF developers have posted to GitHub. Those scripts were written for PHP 7 and do not work under PHP 8, which is what my server uses.

After dozens of iterations and nearly $300 in Claude extra usage fees, I was able to get these scripts to work remarkably well. All posts were ported over with their attachments, and links to other posts within the same forum were updated to reflect their new values. Claude also programmed a script that redirects links to the old YaBB posts to their new locations under SMF. You can view the result here, and you can download the scripts here.