Ok I have tried some of these converters and none seems to work for me so I decided to do this manually. Thankfully my forum isnt that large yet and I have a managable size of posts and threads.

Anyways I have been doing good so far and was trying to figure out how the posts in a thread link together.

This is what I understand of the database so far.

ID in jos_fb_messages is what links the msgid to jos_fb_message_text. It also give the posts a numerical order in which they were writen.

Thread is the order of the "thread" people are replying to (ei. I just created a new "thread" here so therefore it gets a new number in the database.

Catid is the category where this is stored as defined in jos_fb_categories.

Ok so Parent. This is the part that gets me and the thing I need answered to finish my convert. To my understanding this is the value that links posts in a thread. So correct me if I am wrong but for a new thread it sets a value of 0 for the parents. 0 meaning no parent. The next post in the same thread takes the ID of the FIRST post and uses it as its parent?!?! For example...

ID......Parent....Thread......CAtid
3...........0...........2.............4
6...........3...........2.............4
12.........6...........2............4
24........12...........2............4

I am understanding this correctly or am I missing something here?
If anyone can shed some light on this it would help me out alot.

You are almost there. The parent is the post somebody replied to or quoted from. If replies are always made at the end you example is correct. If somebody goes back and replies to the second post the next one would look like this:

ID......Parent....Thread......CAtid

3...........0...........2.............4

6...........3...........2.............4

12.........6...........2............4

24........12...........2............4

25........3...........2............4

This is required for the thread view where new branches can get created.

Hope this helps!