Successful import from vBulletin 3.8 to xenForo 1.1

shawn

Well-known member
I migrated our vB forum to xenForo on Friday night and Saturday. We have roughly 800k posts, 16k members, and 100k threads. Total import time was probably in the 4-6 hour range, with some permissions checking and stuff added on at the end. Most of the import was actually done by Friday night, with search engine rebuilding and cache rebuilding going on through the night.

Our forum made heavy use of vBulletin's Joinable Usergroups functionality. Jon Wainwright (Waindigo) wrote an add-on for us that added this to xenForo and also imported all of the existing joinable groups data.

We also had several hundred "Paid Subscriptions" (Account Upgrades in xF) that needed imported. Jon wrote an add-on for this as well, so we didn't have to enter that data manually.

We also had a few thousand photos in vB's user albums. We're using the [xfr] User Albums add-on and its associated importer for this functionality.

We're also making use of Jaxel's excellent xenAtendo add-on to help publicize and organize upcoming events.

xenForo Enhanced Search allows us single-character search queries and 1000 result sets.

Syndol's Conversation Manager and Darkimmortal's Minorin editor toolbar added MUCH needed functionality... especially the editor toolbar. I didn't realize how many of our users were visiting on their phones and iPads and were unable to use the default WYSIWYG editor. We also installed Forum Runner and Tapatalk, but lots of folks prefer to use the default browser.

All in all, the migration went very well. Most of the user feedback has been legitimate usability questions relating to moved/renamed/etc functionality vs the old software. We also still have some work to do on the templates to make things easier to find and use (also a few spurious CSS issues, too).

From an admin perspective, we did (what I thought) was a lot of testing beforehand. The last few days have unearthed all sorts of great stuff that we never ran across during testing. The reported posts features are awesome. We're just beginning to figure out how to make good use of the warnings system. Alerts are great (but I knew that from visiting here). Oh, and the private conversations are SO much better than anything we had before. I was having a conversation with another user when I realized part-way through that another admin needed to be in on the loop. Added her in, and she immediately had access to the whole conversation thread.

Anyway, I figured that a (relatively) quick rundown of our process and experience would be useful to other folks. Feel free to ask any questions.
 
No questions just want to congratulate you on what sounds like an extremely well managed job.

Looking forward to taking a peep when you're settled down.
 
Nice one Shawn. My users too have really liked the Conversations compared to the old vB PMs. Not just being able to add people to the conversation, but the way it is threaded, and ability to add attachments. The only problem I had is people replying by email to the notification emails (thinking they are replying to the Conversation, but really just replying to the notification email) but a quick phrase edit to add a "Do not reply" fixed that.
 
problem I had is people replying by email to the notification emails (thinking they are replying to the Conversation, but really just replying to the notification email) but a quick phrase edit to add a "Do not reply" fixed that.

I had this problem too and it's weird how the email templates are hidden in the DEvelopment section of the admincp.
A lot can be done with Phrases but you need tio get at the templates to know which these are.
A also found the fussy design of the upper section of the emails annoyed people esp those whose emails systems gave previews. So I moved all that below the content.

Needs an addon to give access to these templates.
 
Congrats on the migration - and excuse me if I'm being a bit dim - but what's the URL for your site?
 
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