Moving a Big Board from vBulletin to XenForo?

Agusti Fernandez Pardo

Agusti Fernandez Pardo

Member
Hello there, I've got here since we updated our forums to vb4, I hate this last release, didn't know about all the 'changes' on vBulletin Development Team, but now it all makes sense... I've paid a lot for my move to vb4, and I'm not really happy about having to look for new perspectives. I might consider moving to XenForo, but there's a lot of things I need to get in XenForo to be able to do that.

Some of my forum stats, so you get my POV.
Threads: 220k Posts 1500k Members 1500k
Online users minimum: 1000, Online users average: 3000, Online users top: 6000 (Time:15Min)
Daily Analytics (Google) 150k visits, 1200k pageviews.

I also will need some custom stuff done, I dont need it to be free, I can pay, but I need to know if there's people willing to do the work or not...

And the most important question I've, SEO.... 70% of my traffic is organic, Meaning I can't risk to ****up with google, so, does XenForo really include all the stuff vBSEO does but without to pay for an addon? Or will I get my organic traffic ****ed up with the change.

I'm not sure if there's any forum that big using XenForo, I haven't been able to find it, So I would like to know if XenForo Staff can tell me if everything will be ok or not before making this swap.
 
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3. Restrictions
This license is granted to You alone. You may not redistribute the Software in whole or in part. You may not rent, lease, sublicense, sell, assign, pledge, transfer or otherwise dispose of the Software in any form, on a temporary or permanent basis, without the prior written consent of XenForo Limited.
For the avoidance of doubt, You are solely responsible for managing content posted using your installation of the Software (“Your Content”). XenForo Limited shall have no liability in respect of Your Content including but not limited to its accuracy or lawfulness.
You are solely responsible for ensuring that Your Content and Your use of the Software complies with all applicable legislation and regulations, including but not limited to all applicable Data Protection and Privacy legislation. You undertake to ensure that the Software is not used by You or others to engage in illegal activity. You may not use the software to engage in any activity that would violate the rights of third parties. You hereby agree to indemnify Us from any loss or damage arising from Your breach of this provision.
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http://xenforo.com/license-agreement
 
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User said:
if they don't care about intellectual property laws then odds are they don't give a **** about the vB license terms. ;)
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vB has their license terms just as Dell has theirs:
As part of the export compliance process on Dell's US and UK Web sites, the site asks the buyer four questions: who will be the product's end user, what is the intended use, whether the products will be exported (and if so, to what countries) and whether the products will "be used in connection with weapons of mass destruction, i.e. nuclear applications, missile technology, or chemical or biological weapons purposes".
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Shamil said:
I do envisage XenForo being able to handle such a board with good statistics, however, you might want to wait a bit until Sphinx search is fully implemented into XenForo. The underlying code is efficient and modern, meaning that less time is spent on resolving performance issues, but also, XenForo depends on trusted libraries such as jQuery and the Zend Framework (though little of it is used) which are well maintained, but trusted through the website industry. XenForo deploys the latest in agile architecture by employing the Model-View-Controller framework, opening a world of possibilities for addon-authors to execute code at native level. Henceforth, I am sure that there are developers out there willing to help you convert modifications and the such. I should warn that although the modifications community is continuously expanding, it is modest at best. Having said that, there is nothing peripatetic here. There is no agita; XenForo is simple, fast and efficient. It just works, and is a rarity within the vBulletin community, as I am sure you are aware, hence you are looking for alternatives.

XenForo's SEO is nothing short of unprecedented awesomeness. The usage of effective micro data and semantics gives search engines nothing to complain about. The generated code itself is free from rubbish. It is spectacular to see that XenForo comes with URL rewriting structures which are easy to read and understand by us humans, but also positive in that content is easily recognisable. The software really pushes tries the boundaries of what it can offer in terms of search engine optimisation.

Have you played with XenForo first? It might help answer a few questions of yours.
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Weppa333 said:
I tested an import from VB on my own board (4M posts, but the backup was only 2M posts) without any problem. For that part, Xenforo is a MIRACLE really. Import is PERFECT even for very large boards.

BUT the built-in search speed makes that XF install absolutely useless (and this is running on a dedicated 8 CPU server with 12G) XF generates a search table which is a few GIGABYTES : this is ridiculous. The built in search is worse than VB's default search, which is already very slow.
My VB board uses Sphynx, of course. (In fact, members use sphinx, unreg users are sent to google :) )
I proposed my help testing the new "large board search solution" and they don't need me.
It'll probably magically run out of the box without any field testing.

SEO is nowhere close to VBSEO, especially as they refuse to integrate forum names in URLs. As I've stated in the past, I won't use XF live until this gets fixed/added. Doing it would be SEO suicide.
Imagine a car forum.
You start a thread "new headlights" in the /ford/mustang forum. VBSEO would create an URL like forum.com/ford/mustang/new-headlights.html which would be SERP/SEO friendly for queries like "mustang headlights" and more than that, PUT THE KEYWORDS IN BOLD IN THE URLS which is a great click magnet. XF URL would be a mere forum.com/threads/new-headlights.12345/#blah : good luck to get clicks with that, it's even worse if your board is non english ( "threads" should at least be replaced by a localized word, or just "t", imho.)

That's my opinion.
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If memory serves me correctly, Kier said that while Sphinx will be supported, it is not the preferred choice as there is a solution far superior to Sphinx and offer a far more robust search with lower search times.

Of course, my memory is a bit fuzzy since E3 came rolling through it :P
 
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And what would that far superior solution be?

Im really glad I started this discussion, since more I read on the forums, more convinced I get I will eventually switch to XenForo, the only question remaining is, When?

Let's hope this sphinx or alike-but-better-than-sphinx thing goes on. As far as SEO, I might be willing to take the risk, I'm pretty confident that google will keep sending me visits, I've even noticed a great improvement but due to our recently improved page-load time, They don't really care that much about url structure, I think that feature is greatly overrated maybe due to our own feelings, because the url seems a great deal, but really content is the more important thing I think.

Let's hope that I won't have problems using XenForo for the nature of my forums :/
 
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The solution that Kier has been busy developing is a neat system. It is for forum owners who can satisfy the requirements to run such a thing. In other words, don't expect to be able to run it on a shared server as it is designed to be used by those admins/owners that have invested in an infrastructure to be able to support their massive forum.
 
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Big-Board Search

While XenForo's MySQL FullText search system is suitable for the majority of our customers, MySQL can struggle to sort results with boards that regularly return very large search results.

For these boards, we will be offering a new add-on search product that will be both fast and scalable. This solution will require an additional process running on your server, so is likely to be of interest only to customers running their own dedicated servers.

In tests so far, our custom solution has returned results from a five-million post database up to twenty-times faster than XenForo using MySQL FullText.

Furthermore, the custom solution makes use of the XenForo search framework, so any add-ons that you have installed that make their content searchable through the XenForo search framework will automatically be searchable with the custom solution too.

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/development-update-may-2011.16084/#post-211755
 
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Agusti Fernandez Pardo said:
And what would that far superior solution be?

Im really glad I started this discussion, since more I read on the forums, more convinced I get I will eventually switch to XenForo, the only question remaining is, When?

Let's hope this sphinx or alike-but-better-than-sphinx thing goes on. As far as SEO, I might be willing to take the risk, I'm pretty confident that google will keep sending me visits, I've even noticed a great improvement but due to our recently improved page-load time, They don't really care that much about url structure, I think that feature is greatly overrated maybe due to our own feelings, because the url seems a great deal, but really content is the more important thing I think.

Let's hope that I won't have problems using XenForo for the nature of my forums :/
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When the time comes, Kier and Mike will explain. Other than that, I will be mum about it. I'm guessing they are still refining it before showing it as it was still in a very rough, and early alpha state when I was briefed :)
 
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1. We're not doing anything illegal by linking to third party websites.

2. That License agreement looks like something your lawyers tell you to put to have your back taken care off...

3. Google search with 'xenforo +rapidshare.com' got 237k results, first three where forums using XenForo linking to rapidshare.com....
 
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I run a very large gaming forum with the following stats:
Threads - 599,580
Posts - 6,553,000
Members - 559,254

Note: we regularly prune all of the above

We have about 5,000 users on at any given time with spikes as high as 20,000 users during major releases.

With support for vb3 ending, we are basically being forced to upgrade to vb4. However, I've had my eye on Xenforo for some time now.

For big corporate customers, what advantages does Xenforo offer over vBulletin?

While vb supports memcache, it seems that the support is greatly lacking. Does XF make better use of memcache? If I'm adding new forums daily, will XF properly flush the index and re-cache it?

Is performance, our main concern, better than vb4? Has anyone measured this in any reasonable way?

We heavily rely on volunteer moderators to run our forums. Anything that makes their lives easier and more efficient is important to us. What does XF have in the way of moderation features that sets it apart from vb4?

Thanks in advance!
 
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tonjohn said:
We heavily rely on volunteer moderators to run our forums. Anything that makes their lives easier and more efficient is important to us. What does XF have in the way of moderation features that sets it apart from vb4?
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To address this part, you need to be aware there are some missing moderator features compared to vB3/4. There isn't even any moderator log so there is no record of what your moderators do, there is no post edit history, there is no search for posts by a certain IP (except as a query) as examples.

The good news is these features are heavily requested by users and some will be included in 1.1 (no-one knows when this will be out though). However until then I honestly think larger communities which do have a minority of problem users could struggle, more so those with volunteer mods who are taken on trust and whose actions are vital to log.

Once the moderation feature set matches the stunning end-user experience I think XenForo will be hard to beat for any size of forum.
 
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