my vB4 to xF experience.

My write up

Been putting that together as I have worked through the migration with D-Ray.

xF is the future.

RIP vBulletin.

 

Your first paragraph resonated with me, because I'm in the same boat. I'm no coder, no developer, no designer. I'm not as lucky as you are when it comes to this stuff!

Excellent write-up, Rick! You should've joined the dark side long time ago. Now you get to see just how big of a jump your small RC site can get.

 

Yea, just finished migrating another site last night
was another small one but its helping get into the swing of things before tackling the larger sites.

 

Didn't you really mean Internet Brands and not Jelsoft with this statement?

Scott

 

all of the above.

 

Well, ive ported 3 sites.
2 small boards:
kyoshoforum.com
durhamrc.com

just finished migrating a board from an old domain and vb3 to xenforo. It is a bigboard and has a new domain to kick:

www.theburningprocess.com

• Discussions: 13,763
• Messages: 1,133,461
• Members: 10,825

The migration of the forum was quick. We lost the albums from vb3 during import. It didn't work this time and we didn't try to keep them. Statistically that area of the site was inactive.I should note the other two small board migrations were from the vB4 platforum

Downside of Xenforo, mass moving threads. That is a pain unless you run sql queries.
Another con is lack of developers. This reason alone is the reason I will not port my main big board. It's just not worth the risk until I can get someone who is available to code. I will have to look into Odesk because so far the well is dry.

At least with the lack of devs means I actually save money!

 

Nice work with the skin on theburningprocess.com, did you do that yourself?

 

Had my buddy do it up for me.
Does nice work but takes time. Patience is key unless you pay $$$. lol
**actually, even if you pay our the a$$ does not mean quick delivery.

 

I've never noticed any correlation between the price you pay and the quality of the work when it comes to web designers, coders, etc.

 

Nice site!

What I did was import those albums, too. Then I put it into a private forum. It wasn't much, but that's what I did.

If that's the case, then do the mass move before the migration. Now, there's an idea.

Do it on vB[x] before migrating to xenForo. No risk there.

 

@ragtek is/was an XF dev. His addons are very popular I'm sure he does custom work for the right price.

 

Rick, what's going to happen to the services you offer at www.forumediainc.com ? They seem to be built around us having VB forums.

David

 

FMI is just the inc holding the forum properties. What little servies we provided before will just no longer be available. I have no interest in supporting vBulletin. If I can go another 8 years before leaving xF to something better, then perfect.. I hope not to return to vB.

 

I thought you offered advertising services for other forum owners.

 

This approach worked fine for the vB4 sites we migrated but was not an option for vB3 galleries. Statistically albums are dead, or atleast on my sites they are.
On my 1 bigboard where the gallery seems active.
http://www.rccanada.ca/rccforum/all_albums.php
10 galleries per page x 56 pages. No empty galleries upon viewing today.
According to analytics, the gallery on sees 10,200 pageviews and 7,800 uniques. Unimpressive especially since I have lways felt the gallery was really used. Reality is, it is not. Average time in the gallery is only 21 seconds.
Taking into account storage, queries from the portal and user engagement vs effort I would say that the gallery is not worth having. That having a section itself for pictures would be enough.
Of course, your sites may be more picture / media driven than mine and so results will vary.

Point is, no one will miss the gallery on my sites..sorry, scratch that. The people who want to drive me nuts will miss it and ask me 100x when its coming back and that the site sucks now. LOL

Yes. Pre migration to xF we pruned spam users and merged some groups. We also did move some content but not all. But this is a re-brand as well, so it's not as simple as just moving everything before hand especially when the users were left in the dark about most changes. The site has and will continue to evolve. The lack of mass move ability is a big con for me. It is one of the few short comings of XenForo 1.1.4. I mean, imagine merging 1 forum into the next with 1 million posts and 100 sections.... a total nightmare IMO.

Only advertising for shops related to the topics of the forums. Never really had the chance to work with other forum owners.

 

I agree. It's one of the reasons why I was not hesitant to do away with the image albums/media sections on the old vB3 CODForums version. I didn't care. It's not worth it to waste all that resources, when you have nobody looking at them, or contributing enough to them...

When I bought CODFourms, and moved it over to my servers (ahem, my friend's server), I wasted no time making changes. I moved all Video forums over to it's own section. Then I upgraded to vB4 based on the errors that ensued on server move [vB3 + PHP4 didn't work on PHP5 server]. I waited a few months before moving the site over to xenForo. I made another change: I put a "completed suggestions" forum based on another website's style.

So, rebranding is good. You don't need to let your users know. They'll figure it out. Yeah, you'll have some idiots posting in the wrong forum [videos in suggestions = facepalm].