grovercleveland
Member
We have a large forum with nearly 6 million posts and are likely going to make the jump to Xenforo.
We've been contemplating this for a while. What has been holding us back is figuring out what is possible. Instead of figuring everything beforehand out I figured I should post what we want and you all can tell me if it is possible.
We envision having to pay for some mods, help in switching over. If you are interested in helping us make the switch email me.
Standard features:
1) Guest posting. Our current forum does not require registration to post. We would like to continue this under xenforo. I believe this is possible. Can guests post under any name that isn't registered?
2) Anonymous post (where someone logs in, but can post under a different name, but the admins can see who the logged in person is) is this possible?
3) Is it possible to allow anonymous/guest posting in certain forums, but not others?
4) We'd like to turn off view counts. Is this possible?
5) Can we turn on/off avatars displaying for people? Our current software has no avatars so we can envision some members not wanting to see them.
Categories:
Currently we have one main forum with 5 categories. The posts in the categories show up in the main forum as well. When we make the jump to xenforo we're going to create more categories and subcategories (we have some of them now but don't use them).
C-1) We'd like the ability for posts in sub categories to show up in the main category as well.
So if the main category was soccer injuries and the subcategory was knee injuries, posts in knee injuries would also show up in the main soccer injury category. Is this possible?
C-2) Currently, our main forum page has all the posts in the forum in it. We want to preserve this concept going forward. Likely with xenforo and more subcategories we won't have every posts show up on the main forum page, but rather the top posts selected by our moderators and posts from certain categories. Is something like this possible?
C-3) If C-2 is not possible, is it possible to have posts show up in multiple categories. A workaround would be for the moderators to highlight posts to go in the featured category, but we'd like them to still show up in their original category.
SEO/URLS
We are very concerned about switching over and taking a bid SEO hit for our old posts. Our current forum is CyBoards Lite which no one uses anymore, but Google indexes us very well.
We are contemplating not importing most of our old posts into Xenforo because we don't want to take a google hit.
S-1) Is it possible to import old posts into xenforo, but tell google not to index some of them? If we did this we could also just keep our current URLs for our old content and have duplicate content but google wouldn't penalize us because we would tell it not to index the old pages.
S-2) If #1 isn't possible, have many people with big forums not imported over old posts and kept old threads as were for SEO purposes?
Members/Paid Members
M-1) Since our current software is antiquated we have nothing like membership levels, being able to see what posts someone else posted.I'm not really sure how they work.
Is it possible to make the ability to see the posts by another person or to follow another person a paid feature? I think it's default in Xenforo to do this but we'd like to make it a feature people pay for.
M-2) Is there a list of the most popular add-ons that people use to get paying members?
Installation
I-1) We use scalable servers from linode so we have flexibility in what we can do, but where can we get an idea on how much CPU and resources we are going to need? Where is the best place to get paid expert help?
Thanks in advance.
We've been contemplating this for a while. What has been holding us back is figuring out what is possible. Instead of figuring everything beforehand out I figured I should post what we want and you all can tell me if it is possible.
We envision having to pay for some mods, help in switching over. If you are interested in helping us make the switch email me.
Standard features:
1) Guest posting. Our current forum does not require registration to post. We would like to continue this under xenforo. I believe this is possible. Can guests post under any name that isn't registered?
2) Anonymous post (where someone logs in, but can post under a different name, but the admins can see who the logged in person is) is this possible?
3) Is it possible to allow anonymous/guest posting in certain forums, but not others?
4) We'd like to turn off view counts. Is this possible?
5) Can we turn on/off avatars displaying for people? Our current software has no avatars so we can envision some members not wanting to see them.
Categories:
Currently we have one main forum with 5 categories. The posts in the categories show up in the main forum as well. When we make the jump to xenforo we're going to create more categories and subcategories (we have some of them now but don't use them).
C-1) We'd like the ability for posts in sub categories to show up in the main category as well.
So if the main category was soccer injuries and the subcategory was knee injuries, posts in knee injuries would also show up in the main soccer injury category. Is this possible?
C-2) Currently, our main forum page has all the posts in the forum in it. We want to preserve this concept going forward. Likely with xenforo and more subcategories we won't have every posts show up on the main forum page, but rather the top posts selected by our moderators and posts from certain categories. Is something like this possible?
C-3) If C-2 is not possible, is it possible to have posts show up in multiple categories. A workaround would be for the moderators to highlight posts to go in the featured category, but we'd like them to still show up in their original category.
SEO/URLS
We are very concerned about switching over and taking a bid SEO hit for our old posts. Our current forum is CyBoards Lite which no one uses anymore, but Google indexes us very well.
We are contemplating not importing most of our old posts into Xenforo because we don't want to take a google hit.
S-1) Is it possible to import old posts into xenforo, but tell google not to index some of them? If we did this we could also just keep our current URLs for our old content and have duplicate content but google wouldn't penalize us because we would tell it not to index the old pages.
S-2) If #1 isn't possible, have many people with big forums not imported over old posts and kept old threads as were for SEO purposes?
Members/Paid Members
M-1) Since our current software is antiquated we have nothing like membership levels, being able to see what posts someone else posted.I'm not really sure how they work.
Is it possible to make the ability to see the posts by another person or to follow another person a paid feature? I think it's default in Xenforo to do this but we'd like to make it a feature people pay for.
M-2) Is there a list of the most popular add-ons that people use to get paying members?
Installation
I-1) We use scalable servers from linode so we have flexibility in what we can do, but where can we get an idea on how much CPU and resources we are going to need? Where is the best place to get paid expert help?
Thanks in advance.
