Best approach. VB to xenForo

[klykken]

I have a an old vBulletin install
Stats say 'Threads: 17,185, Posts: 90,415, Members: 10,907, Active Members: 469'
Version is 3.6.5
It's installed on domain.com/forum/

What would my best approach be to switch? Do install in a new directory? I was hoping maybe someone had written a guide specifically on vb -> xenForo . There's so much info on these forums, I was hoping someone could direct me to the right place.

 

[klykken]

I would recommend doing a test install and test conversion first, once you've bought a licence, so you can iron out any issues without time pressure of moving the site.

If I do that I'll never get this done. I work best under pressure ;-) I'll just jump right into it tonight.

Moving to a different server directory in XenForo is very simple.

How can I move my installation to a different directory?
Update the Board URL in the ACP -> Options -> Basic Board Information and move the files to the new directory. You may need to restart the server for the change to take effect.

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/frequently-asked-questions.5183/#post-180455

Most excellent Brogan, I think I can undertake this now!

 

[Dean]

This is close to what I had in mind.
To make it perfect I would rename the vb forum to 'forumOld' and rename the /xenforo/ to /forum/ granted there's no broken links within xenForo I can't fix.

We went from vb3.8 to xf earlier this year
www.mysite.com/forums is where the vb forums were
www.mysite.com is where the xf forums are
www.mysite.com/oldvb/ is the old vb forums, where it will live for a long time for reference, which is password protected.
The re-direct files from vb to xf are in the www.mysite.com/forums directory. That is all that is in them.

To be quite frank, if you have your vb at 'domain.com/forum' I would choose something other than that directory. From my testing it appears that google wants to crawl places that no longer exist such as domain.com/forum/tags, domain.com/calender, the calender is especially problematic because like the /find-new/ (Whats New on this forum) there are search IDs that seem to change frequently:

http://www.mysite.com/forums/calendar.php?do=getinfo&day=2013-6-14&c=1 404 (Not found)    1 pages    Aug 4, 2011
http://www.mysite.com/forums/calendar.php?do=getinfo&day=2014-6-8&c=1 404 (Not found)    2 pages    Aug 4, 2011
http://www.mysite.com/forums/calendar.php?do=getinfo&day=2013-4-26&c=1 404 (Not found)    2 pages    Aug 4, 2011
http://www.mysite.com/forums/calendar.php?do=getinfo&day=2013-3-16&c=1 404 (Not found)    1 pages    Aug 4, 2011
http://www.mysite.com/forums/calendar.php?do=getinfo&day=2031-2-25&c=1 404 (Not found)    2 pages    Aug 4, 2011

Initially I made the mistake of disallowing /forums/ which of course meant links like this would not be crawled:
http://mysite.com/forums/xenforo-pre-sales-questions.5/

Then I changed the disallow to these types of things:
/forums/tags
/forums/calender
/forums/album

Problem is, google bots seem to have about a 90% batting average with those types of things. 10% of the time they seem to get those things wrong - and they try those places anyway or thinks that links like this are disallowed in robots.txt: http://www.mysite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=34017
(I really didn't want that indexed anyway, but I never disallowed it either)

One example: I've had 3 googlebots in the last 10 hours. 2 of them were successful 3500 times in the cpanel access log, and 1 of them tried completely broken links 72 times and was not successful (apache access_log).

If you went with any other directory than /forum/ you would not have those types of problems, you could just tell it to not crawl that forum any more.

Best of luck.