Lack of installable demo hampering possibility of purchase

[Overscan]

I have a reasonably busy SMF 2.0 forum thats coming up for 10 years old, looking to move to a new platform. I like a lot of things in XenForo, but I have very specific needs. I have 21GB of image attachments I need to preserve for example. I run my server in a sizable VPS.

Ideally, I need to be able to complete a test migration of the forum data to various candidate systems, free or paid, and see which one best handles my legacy data and which one best suits the specific needs of my forum.

The demo could be timebombed, it could put "this is a demo" on every page, it would still be really useful to go through a test migration of my forum and see what comes out the end.

I'm not going to pay $140 on the offchance it can successfully import my data and work in a way I and my users like. For example, Elkarte (an SMF fork) choked on old attachments originally added in SMF 1.0 which lacked a specific DB field added in SMF 1.1.

Just my thoughts as a prospective customer.

Paul Martell-Mead.

 

[Liam W]

XenForo itself doesn't use callbacks, so how would a time limited demo work? Any such restriction could just be removed from the code.

Really, time-limited demos don't make sense for script software...

Liam

 

[Chris D]

If you have bespoke requirements in terms of testing, you could contact us. We might be able to help.

Contact Us | XenForo

Worth noting that our SMF importer is still relatively new and hence marked "beta" at the moment.

Attachments have been problematic, but to the best of my knowledge it is working as expected. If it doesn't then we will help you with that.

 

[Overscan]

Chris - thanks for the reply, I will be in touch. I have put together a list of potential replacements, free and commercial, and I've been able to actually do migrations to various SMF forks and other free forums (e.g. MyBB), it irks me that Xenforo or another paid forum system might well be better for my needs but I can't easily prove it to my and my users' satisfaction.