jesus christ, coming from a software developer, there must have been some fucking horrid, horrible, terrible design choices made in the beginning, that sounds almost impossible. surely if all players' info was stored in a database, it would be separate from the forums? or you could at least extract it in a flat-file format of some sort and then "load it in" to the new forum, but you shouldn't do that either, people's accounts should be separate from the forums and the game, that's what sounds right anyway