footballforums.net - feel the passion

[GarethD]

A bit of background. Football Forums (footballforums.net) is a UK based football (soccer) forum initially started in 2001 as a private venture on vBulletin. 15 years and 8.3M posts later, it has undergone several bouts of commercial ownership and fell back into private hands after a consortium of four (myself included) agreed to take it on in 2014 (I'd been a member since 2003, a moderator since 2005).

We found VB to be clunky, slow, outdated. When we took over we were on VB 4, and VB Connect test upgrades proved to be an absolute nightmare. We made the decision therefore to go with Xenforo, with Enhanced Search. Our migration was completed a few short hours ago, relatively pain free, and in a little over 24 hours. It probably could have been quicker if I didn't have 'life' to do at the same time.

We're using the UI.X framework from Audentio, and haven't made many customisations - a bit of colour changing here and there, and some small config changes. We'll no doubt make some subtle changes over time. I am incredibly happy with Xen, and our members involved in pre-deployment testing were so impressed we brought our migration date forward to accommodate them.

Take a look - let me know your thoughts. Let it be known however that if you're looking to migrate a decent sized database and have any fears, please don't - it really couldn't have been easier!

http://www.footballforums.net

 

[Dakis]

Looking good

I have to say for a forum that big you've done a fantastic job keeping your forum list very condensed.

The only small criticism is that I would personally make the logo a bit smaller.

Great to hear that another big forum has migrated to xenForo.

There is a list with all the big boards on xenForo (well the ones that their owners submitted at least) here, in case you want to add yours :

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/the-big-forum-list.26352/

 

[Member_68162]

Very impressive! If I had a forum with over 8 million posts I would definitely have a unique custom style created for it.

 

[m1ne]

Looking good. Any features you want but haven't found on XF?

 

[GarethD]

Very impressive! If I had a forum with over 8 million posts I would definitely have a unique custom style created for it.

Thanks for the feedback guys. We will look towards a custom style over time; the most important thing for me was improving the usability in the first instance.