Yeah that's the recommended way to do it but it doesn't seem to work.

Sorry I'm usually more thorough than that:

"Fatal error: Interface 'Gdn_IAuthenticator' not found in /var/www/bbs/library/core/class.passwordauthenticator.php on line 31"

is my first error when I try to go to the root website.

i'm attempting to do a pre-RC1 to RC3 and run into other fatal errors. @rhino777, did you ever figure out step 5? i'ld really like to update my database to work with the latest release, but still preserve my forum....

BUMP

Step 5 is pretty simple, but we often find people getting extremely confused. I'm going to explain how Vanilla URLs work here. Please ready carefully.

If you're reading this, your browser's address bar has the following in it:
http://www.vanillaforums.org/discussion/11126/point-new-install-to-old-database

Lets break that URL into its constituent parts

The Scheme:
http://
It should be pretty obvious what this is.

The Domain:
www.vanillaforums.org
This is the domain on which your forum is installed.

The Webroot:
http://www.vanillaforums.org/
This is the hardest one to understand. On vanillaforums.org, we've installed the forum at the topmost level of the web server's document root, so there are no additional folders in the URL. Lets say, however, that we installed Vanilla into a subfolder on our web server, and lets say we called that folder "myforum/". Now the web root would be: http://www.vanillaforums.org/myforum/. Basically, when in doubt, the web root is the shortest URL that gets you to the discussions list.

The Path:
discussion/11126/point-new-install-to-old-database
This is the "request" that Vanilla is processing for you. In this case, if we converted the path to pseudo English, it would sound something like: "give me the discussion with id number 11126". The title part is optional, and is only there to make links look nicer and to improve user experience and search engine optimization.

Now, back to Step 5

"Navigate to the page in your forum that updates your database (this will not work if you did not sign in as UserID = 1): www.yourdomain.com/path/to/vanilla/utility/structure"

"Navigate to the page in your forum" - This tells us to start with the Webroot. Cool, so right now our URL looks like this:
http://www.vanillaforums.org/

"that updates your database" - This is filler text, ignore it. It simply describes the page you are about to visit. URL still looks the same as before:
http://www.vanillaforums.org/

"(this will not work if you did not sign in as UserID = 1)" - This tells us to be logged in as the ORIGINAL CREATOR ACCOUNT of the forum. This is the user your created DURING THE INSTALL PROCESS. URL still looks the same, but we should now be logged in as the primary admin.
http://www.vanillaforums.org/

"www.yourdomain.com/path/to/vanilla/" - This is a common way of specifying URLs whose beginning is unknown to the writer. When we write "/path/to" it is a way of saying "the fully qualified path to ". This is basically a reiteration of the first part, where we say "Navigate to the page in your forum". URL stays the same.
http://www.vanillaforums.org/

"utility/structure" - And now we just tack this on the end of our URL:
http://www.vanillaforums.org/utility/structure

And that's it! If you did everything correctly, you should get a page that looks something like this (theme may vary):

bonk!

Any more help for us suckers that installed during the pre-RC days? :)

@rhino777 curious as to why you haven't upgraded?

@Raize because I can't! That's the whole point of this thread...hehe...going to try Tim's new suggestion later tonight though and see what happens.

So I just upgraded again to 2.0.16 (which did fix a couple more bugs we noticed...thanks!) but not html links have died. They just come up as text and not links...same for youtube embeds and such....any ideas?

Thanks!