Another one for the big board list

duderuud

duderuud

Well-known member
After months and months of talking/planning/building/scripting/translating and testing we are live!

https://www.motor-forum.nl
One of the biggest Dutch forums dedicated to motorcycles.

indexold.webp newpostsold.webp

Our previous software was very old and custom so some extra work went into that ;)
It also ran on old dedicated servers which was a pain in the *ss.

We now use 2 VPS servers and so far it runs without any serious problems.
There are a few questions from users, some find the transition quite hard. But that was to expected because the previous software was really old(skool).

But all in all the migration was a success!

I would like to take the opportunity to thank a few people:
  • The @ThemeHouse team for creating a very nice custom design and template. It took a while to build and for them to answer all my questions but it looks awesome now.
  • The Xenforo team and you guys. This forum has been of great help with a lot of stuff I couldn't figure out. Thank you all!
  • A special word of thanks to Alex (@alexD). He built an custom add-ons and an amazing custom CLI converter that handles stuff I didn't even think about. He also helped with like a 1,000 smaller bugs and questions I had. Without him this migration wouldn't have happened.

I know Motor-Forum is in Dutch but still I would like your feedback too. What do you think?
 
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How, just how does a motorcycle forum have so much activity. Kudos!! Love the theme, best choice of theme designers @ThemeHouse . All the best! If it was in English, I reckon you would have a lot more interest too.
 
We specifically focus on the Dutch (and Belgian) niche of motorcycle enthusiasts, yes that's a pretty narrow usergroup but I think it is the basis of our success throughout the years.
And yes it's big but I started the forum way back in 2001, that helps too...
 
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Very nice! Your site is certainly looking good and loading really fast.
Did you do any customizations? What are your server specs?
 
My plan was to start small.
Webserver has 2 vcpu's and 4gb of mem, DB has 4 vcpu's and 8gb of mem.
Both equipped with SSDs.

Running Ubuntu, Nginx, PHP7.2, Redis and MariaDB through Cloudfare.
 
Time for a Motor-Forum update!

indexlight.webp indexdark.webp


In Nov. 2020 we switched to a custom variant of the Bolt design by @Russ. The design of Themehouse was nice to look at and was feature rich but was also heavy on resources so quite slow to render.
We wanted a faster, more responsive website and the designs made by Russ are the best in that category (imho that is). Also easier to update!
The included dark mode made it an even easier decision.

A few weeks back we also switched from VPS servers to a dedicated server at Hetzner with 128gb of RAM and large 2TB SSD disks (we host about 750GB of attachments). The server runs Centminmod, by far the easiest way to get the most performance out of your server. Thanks for that @eva2000 !

So Motor-Forum is quite optimized, the only thing ruining the experience a bit are ads but hey, nothing you can do about that.

Some stats:
  • Founded in 2001
  • 30 million posts
  • 167k users (with no spam acounts, they were removed a while back)
  • No tracking ads (I hate online tracking myself)
  • 2 big custom add-ons, a market place for used motorcycles and a MotoGP manager game
 
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