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..' :(
 
I moved CycleChat from IPB to XF in November of last year and have seen a marked increase in participation as a result.

I also find it much easier to manage with XF's inline modding tools. (y)

Cheers,
Shaun :D
 
I moved. I don't track traffic and SEO however, so I don't have before and after stats, I can only focus on the experience of the members. Which has been virtually entirely positive. Posting of actual content has gone up a lot, Xenforo creates a virtuous circle with the alerts and likes system, this rewards members posting and they take even more part in the community. The handling of video and images is also so much slicker, post content looks so much nicer.

The only downer is the search engine ranking drop, but then I did also change server and change domain, so I did just about everything I can do dent my standing on Google :) I expect it will climb back up in time (the sitemap plugin is feeding Google all my new pages anyway, and I do have redirects in place).

I'm not quite so sure it is easy to pick between IPB and XF. Both are strong products, and both companies have strengths and weaknesses. IPB has established gallery and calendar options. However looking just at end user experience, I think XF is the best. Isn't that all that matters, how the end user (your customer) feels?
 
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 moved both my forums from vb to IPB and it destroyed them. I've moved to XF and they are starting to grow again, but a new one I made XF from the start is rocketing.
 
When you are saying 'destroyed' can you please explain in what sense? In terms of user experience or SEO? I am planning to start one with Xenforo soon.
they went from very active to quiet as. Why? The platform was great for an admin in terms of module integration and support ie blog/gallery/cms/forum etc but from a users perspective it was too complicated and didn't integrate properly.

I've posted before with comments both here Share your success stories and there is indepth analysis on why I think IPB failed on their site.
 
one largish (second biggest in its niche) forum i work with had a 100% increase in unique vistors within a month of moving to xenforo from vb (from 25k to 50k)
 
I've been reworking a few small sites and integrating 176 different domains into one network. XF saves me time.

The number one issue has been spammers. Most spammers have successfully been pushed off the networked sites. Under vB, the sites used to get spammed all day long. Yes, a pain in the butt! The vB forums could be overrun in a day of not watching things. After the XF change, the WP side continues to collect the spam comments in moderation queues but the XF is easy to maintain.

In terms of membership - It'll all happen in good time. Content matters.
 

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Moved from vB to IPB - which, like optrex, caused me to lose traffic. We went from pretty active to dead in the water. It came to the point where it was convert to XenForo or close. We converted and saw an instant increase in activity.
 
We moved from vB to XF and thanks to redirects we didn't lose any web search traffic. However we did lose most (if not all) our Google image traffic.
 
Would it be possible for any IPB to XF converted forums to share their keywords page from Google webmaster page and share their crawl error page? It would be nicer if someone using XF from day one on their forums could share stats..from Google webmaster.
 
Thanks Shaun. Your search traffic seems to have taken a hit post migration to XF. :( That is the most important factor for us.

Somehow IPB SEO is really fracked up. Nobody seems to know why.

Did you upgrade to IP.Board 3.3.x? The last upgrade was supposed to improve SEO. I am not convinced that there is much improvement with the last IP.Board upgrade, at least nobody is telling about any success stories.
 
Thanks Shaun. Your search traffic seems to have taken a hit post migration to XF. :( That is the most important factor for us.

Only in the short term (which is expected as Google detects a change of platform and reindexes like a hamster on speed) - it recovered much quicker than when I migrated vB to IPB (there's a whole big thread over on IPB about SEO and the effects myself and others noticed after migrating to IPB. All told I think it was about six months for things to level out after moving to IPB).

The big difference for me though, and the reason I moved in the first place, is the user experience. XF is just a pleasure to use and administer compared to the multi-click, multi-screen, click-and-scroll setup of IPB 3.1.4 where things are all over the place and not set out in a logical (for me) order. [NB: This may well have improved in later versions, it's been a while since I used it as Admin].

I have only seen improvements since moving to XF - better in-line modding tools, easier editor (members getting on with it soooo much better than the IPB 3.1.4), faster search results, lower load on the server, and - best of all - an increase in participation. More uploads/attachments, more PMs, more threads and posts.

I've also been through two upgrades since converting and none of them broke my skin; I stopped upgrading IPB Suite because of the amount of work involved in repairing the skin each time an update was applied (at the time the point releases were coming out within weeks of each other!).

I think my main concern was that I'd miss a lot of the finer controls that were present in IPB - like vB it has been developed over many years and has had a lot of features and settings added to suit various customer requirements and requests - but the simple truth is that whilst I missed them to start with, I soon found that the site worked just as well without them and that it didn't have anywhere near the impact I first imagined it might have done.

I get more done in less time and my moderator team and membership are more than happy with the change - it has definitely been a good move. (y)

XF won't suit everyone, and if you're currently heavily using Gallery, Blogs, Chat, Content and Nexus then you've got a bit of work cut out both in finding suitable XF add-ons and migrating the data (I had to do gallery and blogs manually) - but for me I feel it was worth the effort and that moving to XF was the right move for CycleChat.

Cheers,
Shaun :D
 
Thanks for the detailed post Shaun. I have no doubt about XF being a better platform in terms of usability. And fortunately it has everything that we need to set it up. My only concern is/was the search traffic.

I say was because now I have two concerns. I went through a long thread here which talks about the future prospects of XF and the concern looks genuine to me. This again will be a deal breaker as we want long term stability now. Having burnt our wings once we do not want to keep hopping between forum platforms.

Did you upgrade to IP.Board 3.3.x? The last upgrade was supposed to improve SEO. I am not convinced that there is much improvement with the last IP.Board upgrade, at least nobody is telling about any success stories.
Yep and no joy for me as well. In fact the traffic is plunging further.
 
Gabby I am not new to this forum scene. I have owned and managed all of VB3, VB4, XF, and IPB. Suffice to say that XF is the absolute best forum software out there in terms of features and usability.

I am also aware of the spineless directionless management at IB and have read all about the great Mr. Cole in the past. I am also aware of how our site was doing on VB in the past.

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.

So that is why we chose to get back to the safety of VB both in terms of traffic and also in terms of future stability. I hope this lawsuit ends soon so that we can all bask in the future of foruming.
 
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