Anyone moved from VB and/or IPB

So who all have migrated from VB and IPB to XF? What I want to know is how has the traffic shaped up after the movement. It would be great if I can get some reassurance on that. :P

Would it possible for you to share your forum link with me along with the month in which you moved so that I can look at the traffic trend.

Lots of members warned me about not moving to IPB from VB and now they are welcome to say 'I told you so..' :(
 
Sub,
I know it tough but for me I am willing to take a hit if it means getting the heck away from bloat and ****ty behavior. I mean VB isn't cheap and they certainly don't exactly have a nice support forum-which to mean is real important. I'm not thin skinned by any means but if someone talked to me the way Mr. Cole talked to this customer, I would be getting my money back if it meant litigation. I had been with VB3 as well and never once to I feel like I wasn't walking on eggshells if I had a question.

Well I hope your move is a good one for you. All the best.

Gabby
 
I believe the issue at present is none of the developers have posted any new things or announcements since a while on development.. it's more then 3-4 months since last update on development. I am planning to buy xenforo license too .....I am not concerned with lawsuit.. more concerned with Xenforo future plans and their release dates so we can plan a little ahead.
 
I just did a 300,000+ post forum change from IPB 3.3.1 to XF. Everything went much better than expected to be honest, the only problem was with a memeber who had a weird name.

After the conversion I needed to change some of the usernames as they got a little mixed up 10-15 or so. Apart from that everything else went well including personal messages, watched threads, etc..
 
So who all have migrated from VB and IPB to XF? What I want to know is how has the traffic shaped up after the movement. It would be great if I can get some reassurance on that. :p

Would it possible for you to share your forum link with me along with the month in which you moved so that I can look at the traffic trend.

Lots of members warned me about not moving to IPB from VB and now they are welcome to say 'I told you so..' :(


I can't really give you specific statistics from an import as I did not do one on any of my previous sites, but I can tell you that I started a new website a few months back with one of my licenses and have passed a website that I admin in search engine indexing. That website has been around for years and also has vbseo installed on it.

I also think that the user interface is much more inviting in XenForo which will cause many of your members to return more frequently.
 
What I am not aware of is how will the search engines take to my site on XF, no one so far has posted any stats where the SE traffic was steady or improved. I am also not aware how long will this lawsuit last and what will happen to XF post that. Most importantly I am not aware where the developers are or whether they have already abandoned the ship.

For us (vauxhallownersnetwork.co.uk) we are now back to stable / increased traffic.

If you are planing to move, please learn from a couple of the mistakes I made...

First off, ensure you put the redirects in place in your test environment first and not just assume it'll work on the night... that cost me a lot of traffic initially with a lot of dead links, as soon as the guys on here helped me put it right things started to return to normal.

Make sure you copy over the same forum title etc.. our hits went down simply because I didn't put the word forum back in the title for example.

Still glad I made the move though, the site runs so much faster and using less resource than it ever did with VB4, I've noticed the average time on the site has also increased too according to analytics :)
 
We moved from vb3.8 (plus vBseo) to XenForo in February.

One of the main reasons was there were several bugs and a few repeating issues that were occurring because vBseo wasnt playing nicely with vBulletin. One recurring error that we had was where users would make a post or create a thread and when they pressed submit they would get taken to the homepage and their post/thread would be lost.

Some members said they had written out over a page of text and lost it. I advised them that in future they should write long posts out in notepad or another text editor first. Not an ideal situation and it meant that I still needed a solution.

I tried getting vBulletin to help but they shirked the issue and sent me to vBseo. Whilst dealing with vBseo, I realised that I had forgotten my vBseo password. vBseo were very unhelpful in helping me get the password back or finding a solution to my problems.

In the end I had to Google for advice on how to replace my vBseo password and when I finally got it reset, no-one at vBseo or vB seemed to know why my problem was happening. I even asked the people on my server if they were to blame and they had no idea either.

So I thought to hell with all this stress and converted to XF, we're over 3 months on and no more headaches. Best of all the XF add-ons really are just plug and play. Simplicity itself.

Here's my forum on XF...

http://www.cricistan.com/forums
 
I believe the issue at present is none of the developers have posted any new things or announcements since a while on development.. it's more then 3-4 months since last update on development. I am planning to buy xenforo license too .....I am not concerned with lawsuit.. more concerned with Xenforo future plans and their release dates so we can plan a little ahead.
I doubt Kier and Mike have abandoned us or their product. They're just overwhelmed at the moment which I can understand. I am going to purchase xenForo as well but I am hesitant like you until I know for sure which direction things are going. The lack of updates from the development team also has me concerned.
 
Suffice to say that XF is the absolute best forum software out there in terms of features and usability.

As much as I love XenForo I can't agree with this. XenForo's core feature set is currently limited compared to other scripts, even free scripts like MyBB. Its usability is good, but quite honestly not as good as WBB's, the most overlooked commercial forum software outside germany imo. The reason I am not using WBB is that I can't agree with certain policies of the team. Also the next major version is scheduled for release by end of this year. Perhaps I will give WBB4 a chance then, but now I am happy with XenForo for what it can do.
 
It depends on how you classify 'best forum' and what that means to you personally. It's a very subjective term.

If best means the most feature rich forum then vB is probably still number one simply because of the legacy of it's add-ons. You can pretty much make a vB forum do anything you want as long as you are proficient enough as a coder to fix the problems that will occur when trying to run such a massively hacked piece of software.

To me best means a software that just works out of the box and runs smoothly with minimal updates. This is because I just dont have the time nor the inclination to be applying updates and submitting new bug reports every other week. From that perspective I haven't needed to update my XenForo forum since Fenruary so it's the best for me.

As for features then I agree that XenForo is very lagging in some very basic features like when and who last edited a post, the ability to merge users which is a basic, global threads and many other small inconveniences. Also it doesnt have anywhere near the customisation of other scripts out there, that is unless you know how to make the template changes and create add-ons yourself.

So no objctively it's not even close to the most feature rich forum out there but subjectively for me and it seems quite a few others, it's the best solution (at the moment).
 
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