I'm considering upgrading from vB3 to a forum with PHP 8 support..

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Neil Alden

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Hello! I'm considering upgrading from vB 3.8 to a forum with PHP 8 support. Choosing between XF and a couple of other popular forum engines. Here my questions:

1. Will XF work on my VPS with a 4-core processor and 8GB of RAM. Current vB 3.8.11 works fine with Server Load Averages ~0.7
Threads: 150k, Posts: 15 Mill. 1k users online. No significant products/plugins exept vBBlog. Search Engine is disabled.

2. Is it possible to get a vB3-like style for XF? There shouldn't be any stress for users when switching to a new version of the forum.

3. Is there a convenient advertizing management for placing ad blocks in all places of the forum? There was no such functionality in vB3, but after the upgrade I want to get it.

4. Is the search engine optimized on XF, since the default search in vB3 brings mysql to its knees (Server Load Averages ~2.0), and Full-text search does not provide any advantages other than increasing the post table by 2 times. So I was forced to disable search engine on vB3, but on the new forum engine I want to enable this feature.

5. Does XF have bounce email management to automatically process all bounce emails? There is no such functionality on vB3.

6. Is it possible to enable advanced statistics in the footer on XF, like on vB3 using the "Cyb - Advanced Forum Statistics" module (https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=201274)
 
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If VB works fine with the server specs, then so will XF.
Load will likely decrease.

Third party styles are here: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/categories/styles-2-x.45/
Or you can design your own.

XF has ad templates and locations built in.

Standard MySQL search is the same for all software.
It requires having a search index which duplicates the content being searched.
The default search works fine for most XF sites.
For larger sites, or more functionality, you can opt for Enhanced Search, which is what is used on this site.
Note that MySQL search typically has a limit of about 1 million posts so you would really need to use XFES if you want search functionality.

Yes, there is bounce email functionality built in.

A third party add-on would be needed for footer stats.
Or you can likely create something simple with some template edits or a widget.
 
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Brogan said:
If VB works fine with the server specs, then so will XF.
Load will likely decrease.
Click to expand...
In my experience ten years ago, converting vB 3.7 to XF 1.x made our server load drop in half. And we couldn't upgrade to vB 3.8 since I had made so many modifications to 3.7 to reduce all the server load and page loading issues we had. Even as we get busier with each passing month, XF still doesn't give us the crippling loads vB did.
 
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I migrated from VB 3.8 1.5 years ago. I had issues getting everything in place so I paid a member here to do the migration. Glad I did. He was able to migrate all DB's completely and emulate my VB styles for all 5 of my forums. Hardly any down time. He truly made the migration a breeze.

I had him do one forum at a time and moved slowly but WOW. It was the best move I'd made.

Primary reason I was looking for something other than VB was PHP support. PHP 5.x was going out of support and VB could not run on PHP 7.x.

Xenforo team keeps things current. Updates are a breeze. You'll be glad you made the jump once you commit and get er done.
I would be happy to put you in contact with the person that was highly recommended to me. He is great to work with and did a super job. 5 stars for sure. Can make your life a whole lot easier. Message me if interested. Good luck. And, I'll be a little presumptuous and say ..... Welcome to Xenforo!!!! :D
 
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Ok friends, thank you for the answers! Now I'm trying to test the upgrade from vb3 to xf2.2. Questions:

1. How to make a completely empty XenForo installation to have an ability to check "Retain content IDs" during importing from vB3? Like noted at

The import system | Manual | XenForo

End-user documentation for XenForo
xenforo.com xenforo.com
2. How to convert vBGallery to XenForo Media Gallery? Is there an import script?
3. Is it possible to import the latest vBulletin 5.6? Here https://xenforo.com/docs/xf2/importing/ noted that we can import vBulletin only from 3.6 to 5.3
 
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Brogan, I'm testing the upgrade locally on my computer in order to decide which forum to upgrade to - vbulletin 5 or xenforo. Help me sort out these questions before buying a license.
 
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