AVForums moves to Xenforo

[Donny]

Sorry to not be in-keeping with the current discussion in this thread and say; Awesome thread. Even more awesome forum @Stuart Wright - MASSIVE congratulations on the porting over, and even bigger congrats on the Article setup you have and value quite rightly so important. It's an awesome system you've made and anybody should be proud to have been involved. Your article guy (forget his name, only just read it in the interview thing on the admin forum and forgot already) must be absolutely over the moon.

*Tips hat gentlemanly / Englishmanly.

If anybody can make XenZine anything like that for about 50,000 pounds less, give me a shout please. I could make use of that somewhere.

I'm about to grow some balls and transfer over some biggish (seem tiny compared to AV stats) forums over. Done 4 VB to XF moves so far on small forums. So need to just bite the bullet now and do it on the main ones. I hope mine goes smooth.

Also - sidenote: Contacted your webhost for a price on some hosting. They seem to know the score. And obviously have already worked with the lads you've had involved in your porting over, so should be a little smoother than it would be with my own existing host perhaps. So I'm growing some big balls just now attempting this IMO. Host change AND forum software change. Could lose members, or google, or both. Which means the house too. Ouch.

 

[Stuart Wright]

So I'm growing some big balls just now attempting this IMO. Host change AND forum software change. Could lose members, or google, or both. Which means the house too. Ouch.

It's a bit like moving house. Very stressful, likely expensive, not something you think you will enjoy, and has some uncertainty that all your possessions will make it over in one piece. Except the old house is on a flood plain, flooding every year and you can't get insurance for it. So you kind of have to move. Even though the new house is obviously better. It doesn't have a conservatory like the old one, but it will do one day. I quite like that analogy.
Because it's a bit of a risk, don't skimp on the move. Invest money in people who can help you. @Jake Bunce is recommended in this regard. And good luck

 

[Donny]

Thanks Stuart.

 

[Sage Knight]

Your whole site is showing up as broken for me. I tried using both Chrome & Safari.

 

[Ian]

sadly not a fan of the redesigned site.

Have used the site many times in the past, but whilst the software is so much better, the site looks awful. Mainly because it is far too narrow.

Can't see me using it too much as it is not comfortable to use.

 

[RobinHood]

Really liking the new site Stuart.

Slightly curious about the apparent 63 blocked ads using adblock and 67 blocked trackers using Ghostery. The numbers seems to vary depending where on the site you are, but I noticed were particularly high on this page.

http://www.avforums.com/news/lg-to-...ure-quality-gap-with-cut-price-oled-tvs.10577



Seems quite excessive. Would you mind sharing some insight as to why so many, what the important ones do and if having that many has any noticeable downsides?

 

[Golden Falcon]

Really liking the new site Stuart.

Slightly curious about the apparent 63 blocked ads using adblock and 67 blocked trackers using Ghostery. The numbers seems to vary depending where on the site you are, but I noticed were particularly high on this page.

http://www.avforums.com/news/lg-to-...ure-quality-gap-with-cut-price-oled-tvs.10577

View attachment 82536

Seems quite excessive. Would you mind sharing some insight as to why so many, what the important ones do and if having that many has any noticeable downsides?

I don't see that many:

 

[Stuart Wright]

Really liking the new site Stuart.

Slightly curious about the apparent 63 blocked ads using adblock and 67 blocked trackers using Ghostery. The numbers seems to vary depending where on the site you are, but I noticed were particularly high on this page.

If you would care to list them (in a conversation if you prefer) then I can tell you what they are. Because we have between 2 and 5 display ads on a page.
I'm wondering what the other ads are. For example, are Skimlinks links classed as adverts?

 

[Stuart Wright]

AVForums : X-day plus 12 months. Reflecting on our first year with Xenforo

So we’re (a week shy of) one year following the migration of AVForums from vBulletin 3 to Xenforo and I thought I’d post my thoughts.

The migration itself was pretty smooth. @Jake Bunce was a great help to get the data (including that from addons like Thanks and iTrader) over into the Xenforo database.

The mistakes (all of which my fault) were these:

• Getting a non-Xenforo-familiar designer to design the whole site without consideration for the nature of Xenforo. It was a lovely design from Critical Media, but not suited to Xenforo. As a result, Mike Creuzer, tasked with the job of applying the design to Xenforo had to back track on several design elements to make the design work.
• Changing the style too much. It was decided that a change in platform would be a good opportunity to also change the style to a new colour scheme and new fonts. However, members don’t like change and if you change too much, they can find it overwhelming. It was a mistake for us to change the style so radically and I would advise everyone when migrating to Xenforo to consider keeping the font, text colour and post background colour. Then with so many other things changing, at least that will be familiar.
• Installing too many addons. Performance was terrible after the upgrade because I installed too many addons, some of which were not optimised for large forums. I had to cut back on several and do a lot of optimisation. I would advise people to sand by on the ‘nice to have’ addons and see how performance is with the essential ones.
• Not double checking that all the old URLs were being redirected. Jake dealt with most, but some more unusual ones (which equates to tens of thousands) were not. This probably cost us in SEO.

I had hoped that a move to Xenforo would increase our traffic. That hasn’t happened beyond normal seasonal fluctuations. We’re working on SEO all the time.

Site speed does not seem to have increased, either, although I have installed over 60 addons and lots of commercial scripts which slow the forums down. More work needed, there.

I’ve been immensely impressed by the quality of the Xenforo development. Just as I felt I could trust updates in vB3 right up until Kier and Mike left Jelsoft, I feel I can trust the upgrades from Xenforo.

Furthermore, when there have been problems, direct involvement from Mike means they have been addressed quickly.

The problem regarding the lack of some vital functionality is being steadily resolved with regular updates, for example, with the addition of the sitemap in 1.4.

What I really like, and have taken for granted to a degree, is the Elastic search, which has worked flawlessly and is the search solution I was waiting for in vB3. Super-fast, but with the instant updates (new posts added immediately) which we didn’t have with Sphinx.

In addition, the Xenforo community has provided both outstanding addons and support. Whenever there is a question or a suggestion, there is usually a prompt response form people with whom I can identify. I really feel like I belong to the Xenforo community.

If there is one thing I wish I could do at the moment, it would be to either learn to code Xenforo or employ a coder. We have a ton of development work urgently needed. The former requires probably more time than I have at the moment and the latter more money.

What I would like to see going forward is a rewrite for XF2, making it more efficient, adding more essential functionality (like user notes ), with a new, more modern design and compliance with all the latest developments in web technology and UI. But keeping it simple to setup and use. With clear instructions for the community so they can update all the addons quickly.

The news that version 2 is being planned (if not already in development), and the statistics on Digital Point showing that the XF market share is continuing to grow means I can relax in the knowledge that my commitment to Xenforo is justified. I’m 100% happy with my decision to migrate from vB3.

 

[AlexT]

Thanks for sharing your 12 months experience with XF, Stuart. It's very helpful.

Question: Can you share any experience related to advertisement performance before and after the switch? Specifically, I am interested in the impact (if any) you've experienced a) by going HTTPS and b) by using a responsive layout.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Hi Stuart,

Our "big board" is in a similar topic area (and I'm sure, probably has similar types of members), so I can relate to what you're speaking of. A few notes.

1) Members indeed do not like change. We had some highly vocal complainers who even today, still stick barbs into posts every so often about how much worse the new software is. We have attempted to recreate a handful of the popular color themes which we had in vB, so that has helped. For the most part we have stuck to the default XF theme (with those variations in colors), as I got tired of third party themes never being updated properly, or breaking any time there was a minor update. True it's a bit plain, and I could certainly make a few tweaks, but everything works well.

2) I agree on the add-ons. In fact, I have been steadily paring down my list and getting by with as few as I possibly can. I have found that many add-ons I had were not at all friendly to a busy big-board environment. One in fact had a very expensive LEFT JOIN in a query which brought the forum to a halt. Disabling it immediately brought our speeds back up. Any way I can trim the number of queries or disk accesses to me is a help. So in the case of themes or addons, I try to keep everything as simple as possible.

3) In our case, traffic improved. In vB 3.7 we were stuck at a plateau, somewhere around 750-800 users online, for several months if not longer. After our migration, we were at that level for maybe a month or so as we worked out the kinks and members got used to it, then our online numbers soared to almost double that now, in the course of two years. Members are posting a lot more as well--we broke 10 million posts earlier this year and likely will hit 11 million by the end of the year.

4) SEO is something I never concentrated much on, as we were primarily word of mouth. Thankfully I did not buy into the premise of that vBSEO plugin (or whatever it was)--I did not like depending on a third party plugin for something that important, in case that third party ever quit development work on it. Even so, we had decent Google results for topics I looked up. Since I stayed with stock vB URLs, creating the rewrites in htaccess was simple, and I noticed the changes in Google only 36 hours after we had migrated, as the changes were already being spidered. Today I notice for many bits of audio equipment I look up, for example, I often find our site in the first page of listings. Truly by accident I'm sure. (Although I wonder if Google biases its results based on how many times I've looked something up, based on my search history.)

Overall I've been more than pleased with the migration. New releases have come steadily, the developers are in touch with their customers via the community here, and more importantly, the software itself is easy to use and welcoming for those of all skill levels. True there are still missing features we need, but overall if our visitors find the forum helpful enough to visit regularly, then I am ahead of the game.

I still visit a couple of forums that use vB 3.8. Feels like a throwback to 2004.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Question: Can you share any experience related to advertisement performance before and after the switch? Specifically, I am interested in the impact (if any) you've experienced a) by going HTTPS and b) by using a responsive layout.

Our advertising performance relates more to how well the advertising team sell banners than anything else. We were using Google Ad Exchange unbranded (i.e. they can't specifically target our website, but only content of a particular nature) for some remnant inventory, but advertisers were using clever targeting systems to advertise specifically on AVForums, so we raised the cost of the Ad Ex CPM to the same as our rate card. Companies then started contacting us to advertise direct. Now we have very little Google Ad Ex revenue.
Skimlinks revenue has dropped significantly. That's partly to do with Amazon.co.uk not allowing Skimlinks to work on user generated content. I wish this addon had been available 12 months ago : https://xenforo.com/community/resources/solidmean-amazon-and-ebay-parser.3655/ we have lost £thousands from not ditching Skimlinks' solution to the Amazon problem and instead having an alternative Amazon affiliate parser. But Skimlinks revenue has gone down generally. And it's incompatible with the link proxy, so we have to switch that off.
Chris Deeming wrote an advertising addon for us which sends Google DFP the appropriate calls to display banners targeted to specific usergroups, forums, threads, page title keywords, search terms etc. so we're optimised pretty well, there.

We only moved to HTTPS recently and so far we haven't noticed any difference.
The responsive layout, for me, is designed to take traffic away from the app, which we hope to ditch ASAP. Lots of reasons to ditch Tapatalk. But our responsive design is just not up to the job at the moment. I want to use UIX but our particular menu system will need some customisation. I love the 'off canvas' menu of UIX, and I think that is the way forward with the narrowest responsive design.
I think the Xenforo narrowest responsive design needs a big facelift to compete with a dedicated app.

 

[AlexKim]

It's good to see that all the big boards are moving to xenforo software

 

[Wildcat Media]

It's good to see that all the big boards are moving to xenforo software

It was a big decision for me.

I was stuck on vB 3.7, not moving to 3.8 since I had modified quite a few things, and did not have the time or energy to do it, nor the memory to even remember everything I did. I needed to trim quite a bit to get vB to play nice with all the traffic we had. I had Sphinx working smoothly. In other words, I did not want to upset the apple cart.

We did buy the vB4 license for ongoing support for our vB 3.x version, but after hearing that 4.x clobbered the server with even worse loads, I never upgraded.

So despite my already having two XF installations at the time, I had to make certain I could replicate most of our needed features from the big board in XF, whether native or via add-ons. And I also needed to account for the large volumes of traffic. I did have one aborted migration attempt (partially due to my own blunder), but the second one went well.

No regrets here at all. I go back and use a vB 3.x forum now and it feels like an antique. A few I know moved to Huddler (which IMHO ruined the feels of the communities I visited--I lost the sense of community and felt more like I was on a shopping site). Many have still remained on 3.x and I can understand why: it is a huge undertaking. Some have other systems built around the vB3 core (as Stuart did) that it would require too much custom coding to do affordably.

My only regret? I wish search on XF could be Sphinx-powered. I do like ElasticSearch's flexiblity, but I despise Java. It is bloat. It is also one more vulnerability to worry about. Sphinx never sucked up server resources like Java/ES has. And even though we're talking fractions of seconds, Sphinx was always faster. Now that Sphinx offers the instantaneous updating, perhaps someone will create a future add-on for XF 2.x which will let me go back to using Sphinx. It has come a long way since I first used it many years ago in vB3.7.

 

[Mike Edge]

@Rudy Just curious as to what big board you run.. Would you mind PM'n me the URL?

 

[AlexKim]

I did loss a lot of members after upgraded to vb4. The site then dropped really fast, now I am using xenforo. It is a new fresh start for me again. I am trying to send emails to old members by exporting from my vb old database.

 

[dieketzer]

My only regret? I wish search on XF could be Sphinx-powered. I do like ElasticSearch's flexiblity, but I despise Java. It is bloat. It is also one more vulnerability to worry about. Sphinx never sucked up server resources like Java/ES has. And even though we're talking fractions of seconds, Sphinx was always faster. Now that Sphinx offers the instantaneous updating, perhaps someone will create a future add-on for XF 2.x which will let me go back to using Sphinx. It has come a long way since I first used it many years ago in vB3.7.

wasnt digitalpoint running sphinx on xf? im pretty sure shawn was sharing the code as well.

 

[Brent W]

wasnt digitalpoint running sphinx on xf? im pretty sure shawn was sharing the code as well.

vB4

 

[rdn]

wasnt digitalpoint running sphinx on xf? im pretty sure shawn was sharing the code as well.

He is using ES also.

 

[dieketzer]

well somebody was using sphinx with xf. granted, it was a while ago that i saw it, but it has been done indeed.