XF 2.2 Lessons learned from a big (3 mil post) vBulletin 3.x conversion

oldford

Active member
First I want to say that I really like XF. I'm the type of person that doesn't like change and it usually takes me a while to get used to a major swap like this. But I've quickly become as comfortable with XF as I was with vB 3.x, which I ran for 15+ years.

Anyway, the one thing I wish I had done before the conversion to XF was to get all my members to confirm their email was current. I have a lot of long term members (15-20 years) and over that time almost everyone's email changes, but few bother to update it in their forum profile.

Unfortunately with my conversion this last week a significant number of the user passwords did not port over. I've had more than 75 members in 2 days contact me saying their passwords no longer work. I know some of that is just people who think they remember their passwords, but they really don't. But there are also a lot of these members who I trust to be tech savvy enough to know what their password was, but it no longer works.

And since so many long time members don't have current emails on file, they can't use the password reset feature. So now I'm spending a lot of time working with members to compare old email addresses so I can verify that they are indeed the owner of that username.

Bottom line; if I had thought a couple of weeks ahead, I would have put up a notice on my old forum to ask people to verify their email was up to date. Then the password reset function would have taken care of 95% of the issues I'm now having.

Long post, but maybe it will help someone in the future who's converting.
 
In all fairness it wouldn't have made much difference if you had asked everyone to check their email addresses as some would have, the majority not, and you'd have still had similar numbers contacting you .... been there, had the T shirt :)

The next thing you'll find is you will get a number of new registrations with names that are similar to existing members, followed by posts from new members saying they're blah-de-blah but couldn't log in ;)
 
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