Advice for moving your community to xF (keeping your members on-board)

CTXMedia

Well-known member
As part of moving my own large community from vB to IPB last year I learned some valuable lessons.

I wanted to start an "advice" thread for people who are considering (or are in the process of) moving from another platform to xF. General advice regarding keeping your membership informed and on-board.

I'll start, and if anyone else wants to chip in, feel free:
  • Involve your moderators and key members - get your staff/team on board at the very start and maybe include some of your key longer term or most-valued members. Let them know why you want to change and ask them to help you with the migration - they can act as support for you when you do move over, especially as you might have your hands full with the technical side of things.
  • Retain your style, colours, and theme as best you can - people really don't like layout changes at the best of times, so changing the colours, logo, etc. at the same time as you migrate to xF will just compound any negative feelings about the change and may lose you members.
  • Tell people what is going on beforehand - it's easy to forget, as you twiddle with the test install in the background, that your members are not as familiar with xF as you are, and do not know what it can/cannot do in comparison with your current software. Keep them informed and let them know when things are scheduled to happen so they're "in the loop".
  • Let them "play" with it - if you are fortunate enough to be able to, before migrating let your membership play with xF. Let them post some general chatter so they can test-drive the interface and see how it all works.
  • Setup a Migration-specific Support forum - Put it at the top of your forums and maybe introduce it when you open up the test site for them to play with. Be quick, positive and comprehensive in your replies, and this will give people confidence in the change-over.
  • Get really familiar with xF before you migrate - crazy as this may sound, you need to be really familiar with xF before you migrate so that you can offer quick, and good support to your members. They are going to need your help and so you need to know how to do things before your membership fills up the migration support forum.
I'm sure plenty of you can add to the list, so ... away you go ... :)

Cheers,
Shaun :D
 
Thank you GeeksKickAss. This thread I'm definitely going to follow closely as I have a draft for my migration that is quite similar to yours. :)
 
IMHO the most important part is, to port the IMPORTANT add-ons and
Retain your style, colours, and theme as best you can - people really don't like layout changes at the best of times, so changing the colours, logo, etc. at the same time as you migrate to xF will just compound any negative feelings about the change and may lose you members.
before your move:D

I lost too many members because of this stuff.
Specially because a community with an eventcalendar and a gallery was moved from vB to mybb, where i thought nobody would care of this^^




It's hard enough, to have a complete new software which they have to use.
So make it so easy as possible for them. Try to have a similar style, if there are BIG changes in using the software, describe them to your users. It's really important^^.
 
Retain your style, colours, and theme as best you can - people really don't like layout changes at the best of times, so changing the colours, logo, etc. at the same time as you migrate to xF will just compound any negative feelings about the change and may lose you members.
I did everything but this.

I completely changed the whole style, logo, layout, design, in fact everything about the site.

The members love it and not one of them has complained or had any issues at all with finding where everything is or how to use the features.
 
IMHO the most important part is, to port the IMPORTANT add-ons and
before your move:D

I lost too many members because of this stuff.
Specially because a community with an eventcalendar and a gallery was moved from vB to mybb, where i thought nobody would care of this^^




It's hard enough, to have a complete new software which they have to use.
So make it so easy as possible for them. Try to have a similar style, if there are BIG changes in using the software, describe them to your users. It's really important^^.

Actually, that is the only reason I haven't ported yet. Waiting for a couple of mods which I need before I can. :)
 
Very useful post, it's far too easy to forget one or more of those things when you're in a rush or just getting caught up in trying to ensure everything is working. Certainly going to bookmark your post for future reference so I don't make the mistake of forgetting those things.
 
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