Migration from VB 3.8 with VBSEO to xenFORO

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capflam

Member
Hi,

VB is not what it used to be and I am trying to find a more temporary solution to my forum counting about 70k users.
My main concerns are:
1. Can I implement easily or import me VBSEO settings to xenforo?
2. I use VBexperience and my users like it. Is there a similar plugin in xenFORO?
3. I want to make sure that my users can login to our forums just like they are used to with VB. No new registration and such.
4. Do you guys have a mobile app?

Thanks in advance, it would be a great help if you could help me make sense of this potential migration.
 
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capflam said:
Hi,

VB is not what it used to be and I am trying to find a more temporary solution to my forum counting about 70k users.
Click to expand...

1. Can I implement easily or import me VBSEO settings to xenforo?

Xenforo has excellent seo built in (including descriptive URLs, which is what most people were using vbseo for). You can have your existing URLs 301 (redirect) to the new xenforo URLs after the import. Other specific vbseo settings won't be imported, but there's no need to import them because xf already has excellent on page seo.

2. I use VBexperience and my users like it. Is there a similar plugin in xenFORO?

I believe there are a couple of similar xf addons

3. I want to make sure that my users can login to our forums just like they are used to with VB. No new registration and such.

Existing usernames and passwords will convert over

4. Do you guys have a mobile app?

Xenforo is a responsive system right out of the box, so it works great on mobile devices using the regular web browser. Your members can also use Tapatalk if they absolutely must have an app for the site.

You can read about digitalpoint.com's post migration experience here.
 
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capflam said:
Is there a VBSEO importer? My customizations are pretty standard but I'd like not to have to 301 redirect all forums and topics.
Click to expand...
A VBSEO importer would imply that there is a VBSEO equivalent built in - and there is not. This is accomplished by 301 redirects in your .htaccess (or nginx vhost).
 
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I am bumping up this thread (sorry about that) because last year it appeared far too much to redirect all custom URLs.

Is there a converter for VBSEO forums now or a way to customize URLs like this: /forum/[FORUM-NAME]/[THREAD-NAME]-t[ID].html ?

Thanks
 
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capflam said:
I am bumping up this thread (sorry about that) because last year it appeared far too much to redirect all custom URLs.

Is there a converter for VBSEO forums now or a way to customize URLs like this: /forum/[FORUM-NAME]/[THREAD-NAME]-t[ID].html ?

Thanks
Click to expand...
Redirecting one is same way you redirect a million. If you're using Apache, which I'm going to guess you are, you can use the tool Jeremy P linked to above this post, combined with the VB -> XF redirection scripts to do the redirection easily.

There are a few guys on here who offer conversion services from VB to XF, and they'll be able to handle your redirection issue very easily. I'd suggest you use one of their services.
 
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I guess that I should have been more specific:
That tool seems to redirect VBSEO URLS to the original VB URLs. I was looking for a faster approach that redirects URLs directly to those of Xenforo, avoiding the double redirect thing (VBSEO -> orginal VB -> Xenforo).

Actually my question was also: can Xenforo handle URLs like this: /forum/[FORUM-NAME]/[THREAD-NAME]-t[ID].html ?
 
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Yes, you can check off the option to keep content IDs the same. You don't have to do a double redirect.

We were using VBSEO on our board. Now we just have a comprehensive .htaccess file with redirect rules in it so all old links are maintained. For instance, our thread redirect was similar to yours, (url.com/[forumid]/[threadname]-[threadid]) so the following rule sends all URLs in that format to the correct thread ID in XenForo:
Code: 
       RewriteRule ^forums/f[\d]+/(.+)-([\d]+)/?       /threads/$2/        [NC,L,R=301]


We also had some legacy links that used showthread.php, either using t=[threadid] or threadid=[threadid] so we redirected those as well:
Code: 
        RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING}     ^t=([\d]+)
        RewriteRule ^forums/showthread\.php     /threads/%1/?           [NC,L,R=301]
        RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING}     ^threadid=([\d]+)
        RewriteRule ^forums/showthread\.php     /threads/%1/?           [NC,L,R=301]

There are a lot of helpful threads on thread redirects in the forums here.
 
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Thanks. So that works even though VBSEO was installed? I've got quite some image search traffic and don't want to loose that.

Other questions (sorry, I'm trying to check everything before buying):
1. I read the information above and some other threads but I may have missed something:
My VBSEO settings limit the number of words in the URL to 3, plus I have some stop words.
Given this, is it still possible to redirect accurately?

2. Unrelated:
Is Wordpress integration/bridge included or do I have to look for 3rd party addons?

Thanks.
 
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