8 September 2018 Update:
@Peter Selvey -
Countries supported by Paypal which says: "We are available in more than 200 countries/regions and support 25 currencies." I am not sure why you got the error message you got,but it may be because the PayPal button was for Paypal "Donate". As far as I can tell, money can be transferred from Japan (
PayPal(ペイパル) - かんたん＆安全なオンライン決済サービス) according to their "Countries supported by Paypal" link above. I assume you would have to send it directly to me using my email address using their "Transfer Money" function. This is one reason I removed the "Donate" button from the forum header. The Paypal system is a bit weird, as I found out recently. Like I say, I will be making a web page to explain and support donations - Probably this coming week.
General: The project is more or less on time, but an actual switch over may not be until the middle of October. In part this is because while the actual import only takes about 3 hours, after the import it will be somewhat time consuming because, among other things, the import of each individual forum does not directly transfer so once the import is complete each forum must be individually configured in the listing. Then, additional checks have to be made to ensure "permissions" for registered visitors are transferred correctly - Especially current Admins and Moderators. There are a number of other settings also have to be checked and updated.
There are several other aspects which will have to be addressed as well. I am trying to put together a time projection for this to be accomplished. My "best guess" at this point is is that the old forum will be closed and it will be approximately 24 hours before the old vBulletin forum literally disappears and the new one opens. This is because the "rewrite" rules will be put in place once the above is complete. Once the Rewrite rules are put in place all calls for the old vBulletin forum URLs (such as thread links and other internal links) will be given "
301_redirect" redirects to URLs in the new Xenforo forum URLs.
This is an old Google explanation:
Change page URLs with 301 redirects - Search Console Help
This is necessary so that search engines, including Google, understand that pages are not gone, but rather have been moved Permanently. All of this will be transparent to you. It does take a while, sometimes a few months or longer, for search engines to update their indexes to the new URLs. Even if someone does a Search in a search engine and an "old" URL comes up, clicking an "old" link will redirect the person transparently to the "new" URL in the new forum.
Donations
Approximately US$650 has been donated. I took the Donate button off of the forum header for now. I will probably replace it with a Donation page in the near future.
