Anecdotally, people suggest the positive changes stick around, though I would guess that this isn't always the case. It's always going to be a very individual thing. Some forums may be struggling for other reasons that can't be solved by changing the software.
Indeed. I was just quite curious in regards to the ease of interactions. vBulletin has become rather convoluted when it comes to interacting such as posting. Even the "quick reply" isn't very quick whereas here and in the demo of XenForo everything is far more responsive and that is one of the key goal we have: to maintain a responsive site and unfortunately vBulletin just can't do that anymore. Many users complain about "editor jump" where modern browsers will jump to a totally different line in vBulletin while writing a post (or PM, etc.). QA wise, it's the worst part of our site and our site is still in development which speaks volumes in of itself.
Very much so built with it in mind. Most people run XF as it is, maybe just enabling friendly URLs (which removes the index.php from the URL), and this is often sufficient.
Enabling friendly URLs seems fitting. I imagine it's similar to here and in the demo when we did it: no index.php as you described appears in the URL. That falls in line with the rest of our URL structure and it seems to be logical based on the demo. One of the concerns had been SEO and ensuring that all the pages get indexed properly through our submissions, Trusted Site/McAfee Secure submissions, and Norton Secure submissions for both Google and Bing. We monitor Alexa too but naturally, people don't search with Alexa - it's just a good way to see where you stand traffic-wise.
We use it here. It's of course recommended to just make your entire site SSL rather than just some pages. For the most part it should be just the case of configuring SSL and forwarding all requests to the SSL version of our URL. There's a known issue with older versions of nginx, but this is very easily solved (It's unlikely you'll hit this).
Yes, we use SSL globally and are in fact on the global HSTS preload list for virtually every major browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox, etc.) so our site defaults to SSL with no redirects required and the browsers won't load it if SSL isn't used as it states our site only transmits data via encrypted methods (FIPS cryptography more precisely but the browsers don't say that).
We actually use Apache with Litespeed and nginx serves as a proxy to global edge locations. Litespeed plays fairly well with virtually everything because it accepts Apache style directives but XenForo doesn't have issues with Litespeed does it? For that matter, does it have any issues with Squid Reverse Proxy either? As you can tell, this is a pretty complex deployment which is to be expected given that our L3 network per a continent transmits about 30-40TB in a day without adding the R1Soft Enterprise backups into the mix (we use dual GbE or 10G connections for all our servers times two - two private and two public links).
We use mostly InnoDB, with a few MyISAM tables and MEMORY tables for specific use cases. IIRC MariaDB will use its version of the InnoDB engine automatically without changing anything.
This is excellent to hear. vBulletin's support for MariaDB is lackluster at best - even on vBulletin 5 Connect.
Should work perfectly without doing anything
By any chance, do you know how it handles database replication across server [clusters] to ensure HA?
I think the general consensus is this is improved with XF.
This is also good to hear. Load-wise, vBulletin is starting to eat up a lot of resources on diminished returns and users complaining of slow loading only on the forums whereas everywhere else loads quickly and responsively. Naturally, just throwing more CPU, SSDs, and RAM at it wasn't going to fix the problem - it was becoming inherent that it was software related versus hardware.
Not familiar with that directly, but people do use other CDNs quite happily. It's possible to change the URL which static files are served from.
That's alright - if it works on other CDNs it'll work on the Verizon Enterprise Anycast Edge CDN. Technically, this is what a lot of those CDN companies use (Amazon and SoftLayer both technically use Verizon's Anycast Edge CDN). The only difference here is we have direct contracts with Verizon because we work with them so we can cut out the "middleman" although we do use AWS and SoftLayer too.
The current version of XF is compatible with PHP 7.0 and 7.1.
Excellent. We've only begun the testing phase of PHP 7 but naturally we can't stay on PHP 5.6 forever. We've been updating code in preparation for PHP 7 deployment and to know that XF is compatible makes that a little bit easier.
Yes, each forum can have an RSS feed, or there is a global RSS feed.
Correct, this is a framework that should allow you to add other providers, but of course it does require some level of custom development.
Excellent. We want to not only be able to display what's going on in the forums where appropriate but to also ensure that we can script in our SSO Account Management and that the APIs were there to do such scripting. At the basic foundation, the SSO system just has to be able to identify the SSO account to the forum account but if APIs exist in it or can be created within XenForo to more deeply integrate such a system, the better.
Naturally, we are looking at XenForo for the long term. vBulletin served us for a decade and our hope is to find a forum software that can do that for another decade. Our first thought was to take a look at IP.Board but they nickel and dime you to death whereas XenForo just charges a yearly update fee without the nickel and dime.
