Hi again, I somehow missed this field and didn't ask about it in my original post, sorry for that -
I see that there is a post_checksum field, it looks like an md5 but when I run md5 on one of the posts in my own forum - the result was different than the value in the database, is there anything in post_text that is not being included in the checksum calculation? is there any other value included besides this field?
The function is $foo = md5($message_parser->message)
What the message parser has to submit to the database may not be exactly what is stored in the database. I am thinking escaped characters which is probably why you are getting a different MD5 value.
I actually wouldn't worry about the post_checksum. The phpBB2 to phpBB3 convertor does not calculate it. The field is used when editing a post to see if any actual changes have been made when submitting such as if someone else had edited the post while you were editing it.