I have a discussion forum with about 1.5M posts using vBulletin 3.8. I've been running it for nearly 20 years now and have thought about the possibility of upgrading the software.
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I am interested to hear before and after examples to give me an idea of what to expect. Especially helpful would be what happened to traffic after upgrading from your old vbulletin to XenForo board, especially from those who already get a decent amount of traffic.
I just made the switch from vB 4.2.4 to XF 2.1 about six weeks ago. My forum converted from phpBB to vB4 back in 2012. I have more than 180,000 posts, 8,100 users and around 13,000 threads.
Do at least 2-3 "test" imports to get the process down. If you are using a hosted environment, I strongly recommend going to a VPS (virtual server) for the control and increased abilities it gives you. Hosting is just too restrictive, particularly when it comes to things like inode count, database and php settings, and so forth. I went from 1&1 (for my vB4 install) to Linode for my VPS. I am using a package with two processors and 80GB of SSD storage that is $20 a month, but they have smaller packages that can run $5 and $10 a month. Very responsive tech support and great "HOW TO" articles to get you started, even as a newbie to Linux and database admin. You get your choice of Linux that you can use.
You also want to copy your old forum's database (at minimum) to the same server, if different than your vB install, that you are your XF to.
Answers to your questions:
- Could it hammer my rankings? <= The biggest concern.
Not really, particularly if you set up redirects from the get-go, or rather quickly after migrating. I have found little to no reduction in my rankings, and likely an increase due to the more SEO-friendly aspects of XF as compared to vB.
No. If you configure the import correctly, it's seamless. I have 35 GB+ of attachments on my forum (stored in the file system, not the vB database) and haven't lost a single one.
I also had a "mod" on vBulletin wheras linked images to outside image hosters/web sites were automatically imported into my forum, and stored, and embedded into the post where the images was originally linked. More than 18,000 of these imported images. These too I brought over and with the help of XF support, created a redirect for all of my imported posts that referenced these imported images, to access them on my new XF server using the same file-names.
The import of my vB4 photo albums was only partially successful (I had around 400 albums), but I just worked manually to switch these over. I didn't migrate the albums until well after the forum import, because I hadn't purchased the XF Media Gallery software until after I migrated the forum.
- How does Google view different forum software?
Google cares a lot about SEO-friendliness, and mobile-friendliness. vB4, at least, is piss-poor compared to XF in these departments. The mobile capability of XF blows my mind, it's excellent. I actually got rid of Tapatalk after migrating - it was no longer necessary, and balanced with the privacy risks and bugginess of Tapatalk, I was damned happy to abandon it. Google's search console automatically accesses a copy of my XF sitemap every day or two.
- How long does the switching process take?
I would give it a full weekend (24-48 hours) just to be safe. You are going to encounter little niggling issues, but nothing that is insurmountable nor can be solved. Reading others' experiences of imports along with the XF import guide is critical to avoiding problems. Realistically, I think you could do a full migration in probably 8-12 hours if everything went relatively smoothly. The biggest thing I found was post-migration tweaking -- forum and user group permissions, and so forth. In my case, most permissions came through OK from vB, but there was a fair bit of tweaking and methodically going through forum settings to get things just right. And then more and more in the coming days to get things perfect.
It's also a good idea to set database settings for the XF forum appropriately to avoid time-outs and errors based on restrictive file sizes. The ability to do this is helpful and why I recommended going the VPS route, as opposed to a restrictive hoster where you can't tweak settings much if at all. Also, if you want to use some of the excellent mods like XenForo Enhanced Search, which requires the use of the Elasticsearch software, it REQUIRES that you have a VPS, because hosting companies won't let you install things like Elasticsearch.
- Are the forum post urls identical?
As has been said, no. But the redirect system takes care of this seamlessly, once set up. Redirects are like magic !! The key is to create a "virgin" forum with no posts or users, and then import your vBulletin system into this "blank" XF setup. This will minimize issues and allows a database table to be created that maps each imported thread/post into the table. This is what the redirect system uses to cross-reference vB posts/threads to their corresponding XF posts/threads.
- Can you create a test site first before you nuke the vBulletin site? i..e so you can confirm all posts look good and work.
It's an excellent idea to create a test site and do at least two or three test imports before the "real" migration. I did four of five of them starting with XF 1.5, but decided to wait until XF 2.0 came out. Then with 2.1 brewing, which was a major update, I decided to wait until 2.1. I'm glad I did, as 2.1 is a serious maturation point of the forum software over 2.0 and earlier versions.
Cheers,
Gerry
