Thoughts about the vBulletin to Xenforo Software Migration - 2 October 2018

Marc

Fully vaccinated are you?
Leader
To the many old visitors/members:

First of all, I did not want to change to new software. Like an old t-shirt which is comfortable, after about 18 years of using vBulletin I knew how to do things. As I age, new things are not as easy for me. Reality is that the vBulletin software was "end of life"ed at least 4 or 5 years ago. It was pretty much necessary, especially with PHP having been updated.

I miss many functions vBulletin 3.8 had, many of which Xenforo simply doesn't. I personally rarely used some - One of which was a user option to sort posts in a thread first to last or last to first. Like almost every forum I visit these days there isn't that option. They are set oldest first and newest last. My point is: This is new software and as is always the case, getting used to new software does take a while. And many times the new software simply does not have some of the options the older software did.

For the most part, the import was OK. I say "OK" because there were a lot of hiccups which I believe could have been avoided through better planning by the company which did the import and migration. The bottom line, however, is for all intents and purposes, there are some problems (such as some post attachments disappearing from posts here and there) which just are. We're past the point of trying to "fix" some of the issues. That said, if you come upon a problem, please report it and I'll see what I can do.

One big reason for this post it to say that it is new software so there will be a learning curve that both you and I have to deal with. Believe me - It's harder on me than on visitors because I have to deal with learning all the back end stuff in addition to the visitor user interface. Last night was the first night in about 6 weeks that I have actually gotten a decent nights sleep, and I still have a lot to do in the back end configuration options.

If you have questions on how to do something, please post in the "Xenforo Forum Software Instructions and Help" forum: Xenforo Forum Software Instructions and Help

If you have Suggestions, post them here (as always): Elsmar Cove Forum Suggestions, Complaints, Problems and Bug Reports

I appreciate everyone's patience during this migration.
 
Q

QC Dave

Thanks for all that you do to provide this valuable resource Marc!
 

Marc

Fully vaccinated are you?
Leader
The migration was finally completed on 3 October. There were a lot of bugs that were unexpected. Then again, I honestly did expect bugs.

I still have a lot to do, especially configuration options and various changes within the forum. I also have some "add-on"s that I have to try. I figure it will take 3 to 4 weeks for things to settle down, so to speak. And I again hope folks will Report "bugs" and make suggestions. Links are in the first post in this thread.
 

Marc

Fully vaccinated are you?
Leader
Technically Xenforo has an importer script, but it can't import a number of things. And while I had to be watching what they were doing as much as I could by watching server content changes, a company did the actual import, not me. I did do a test import OK, but some of it was "special, such as importing the old vBulletin Visitor Photo Albums into a Xenforo "add-on" called "Media Gallery" (not to mention making "310 Permanently Moved" redirects which was far beyond my experience)..

In short, I can't personally take too much credit for the migration of all the data.
 
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