Moving from a modified vb4 questions

🔥Iggy🔥

Well-known member
hello,
i am trying to learn more about what booby traps and obstacles will pop up if a project moved from vb4.2.5 to xen2..

i am most concerned about what data can be imported or not...without employing custom work...

there are around 50 mods being used atm.....plus a few misc hacks....

things like dbtech thanks/likes, dbtech gallery....that need the data imported properly....then other things i would need to replace like the "easy forms" addon, which i wonder if anything like that exists for xen...

it is a decent sized site.....around 500,000 images between attachments and gallery albums plus many topics on a nearly 15yr old site....

im sure there must be around 10 dbtech products alone, so besides the data importing, we are also wondering about things like platform migration for these paid licenses....anyone know the policy?

vbulletin really crapped the bed and left many of us to clean up the mess, its not a happy thing at all lol....but unfortunately i now have to learn more on this...

thank you for any helps,
Iggy
 
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In short, anything from an add-on/mod isn't something our importer would touch. You'd almost certainly need to get something custom developed to import from those. The importers focus most on the "core" data (users, forums, threads/posts, attachments and similar).

In terms of add-on cross licensing, I suspect you'd need to contact the author for a definitive response, but I wouldn't expect them to do this sort of thing, as the code base would be entirely different.
 
thank you, i have been looking over things alot....i am getting a little better of an idea what steps i would have to take....some parts are still a bit confused tho as there are so many different importers and potential upgrade paths...

i have at least figured out, the best logics seem to be going to xen 1.5 first...importing all the data, then after that going to xen2....

i am still a bit unclear tho which importers or such i can/should use.....this is a medium sized board so its a little hard to tell if we will need things like this 150$ "big board" importer addon i saw in xen1.5....it is confusing what is out dated or not if you follow me....can we use the latest vb importers regardless of which xen version we start with?

i understand things like gallery will be a little of a side mission, needing its own path and importers....esp considering we have a photopost installation which the dbtech gallery made a total mess of importing just by moving to vb4....

even regarding "core forum stuff" tho.....it seems some things are missing like social groups or such....this or that importer may or may not grab this or that etc......i am hoping to see things more clearly as to how to grab ALL the data....and shoehorn it into the xen replacer mods...whichever those are or if they exist etc...

most of them i have been able to find the support info with some research, but yes some overall its still a bit confused...

thank you
 
ok...well...i know sometimes the easiest thing is to just try hands on and see...so we purchased a lic and began testing....

the install of xen 1.5 was smoothed ;P
we downloaded the recent importer from the members area...its started out without any issues...right up until the threads and posts part...

to explain some....it is trying to import 38,000 threads and 620,000 posts...
i dont expect it to happen instantly, it is pretty slow tho....like 20 minutes or more for .01% progress

any suggestions to maybe speed that up a little?

thank you

EDIT: naturally as soon as i press post here it jumps to 99.99% hahaha i will just bear with it a bit....please disregard...
 
ok...well...i know sometimes the easiest thing is to just try hands on and see...so we purchased a lic and began testing....

the install of xen 1.5 was smoothed ;P
we downloaded the recent importer from the members area...its started out without any issues...right up until the threads and posts part...

to explain some....it is trying to import 38,000 threads and 620,000 posts...
i dont expect it to happen instantly, it is pretty slow tho....like 20 minutes or more for .01% progress

any suggestions to maybe speed that up a little?

thank you

EDIT: naturally as soon as i press post here it jumps to 99.99% hahaha i will just bear with it a bit....please disregard...

how did the conversion go? And what made you move from VB to Xen?
 
pretty well so far as i can tell....all things considered...

we lost social groups, dbtech gallery data, and dbtech post thanks(suggested solution didnt work for us)...i believe that is all but at least the gallery data were able to remain linkable in topics so could have been worse...

honestly.....most anyone trying to actually develop on a VB platform knows that VB has been a COMPLETE NIGHTMARE...for several years now.....with not much hope of seeing things change and horrible tech/customer interaction...........they wont even let customers help them fix their horrible software...single mind, in the garbage...

Their choices cost alot of problems and expense to many people i know, and we are only but one of them......After wasting years of effort and bunch of money on vb5 i had been trying to basically recode vb4 into something workable for us the last few years....things like modern responsive flow, that is just a total fight at best....

You can get into this mindset like, whatever it takes, when u feel you dont have any options....basic things like php 7.2 compatibility even, oh well thats gonna be a custom job ppl! After someone offered to share that compatibility upgrade, i was so excited like oh wow are we spoiled now! haha...

there was a list of things i still needed to code support for.....i found most of them already existing and working on xen........i feel only recently it is the viable option for us....but there is no longer any good reasons to hesitate imho.......the last straw was the ckeditor.........what used to be one of vbulletins strong points.....even as a custom job it would have been un-holy hell to try to upgrade the editor so i threw my hands up and looked for other options again!

so glad i did....so glad xen has stuck with it all these years and finally, my eyes, officially replaced vb...what used to be known as "top of the line"...

even just to see an active thriving dev community its such a breath of fresh air as i know things will only keep getting better from here....and i wont have to do every line of code ourselves or have to pay insane custom dev fees for basic functionality!
 
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm so not technically inclined to do this. So I have to look into hiring someone. The links and galleries problem worry me. The forum is basically a how to on building remote control boats, so I can't lose the pictures. Otherwise the old info is useless.
 
I upgraded from vb to xf.

Best move I have ever done.

Vb was like security token errors all the time and it was annoying me and my users.

Switched to xf a few months back.

Upgraded from vb 4.2.4 iirc to xf 1.5 using the importer and then upgraded to 2 then in turn 2.1.

Using Themehouses excellent UI-X theme.
 
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm so not technically inclined to do this. So I have to look into hiring someone. The links and galleries problem worry me. The forum is basically a how to on building remote control boats, so I can't lose the pictures. Otherwise the old info is useless.
Talk to @MySiteGuy he is professional, fair and honest and knows his stuff. You can't go wrong with his pricing either, his rates are posted on his site so you know there's no gouging. He will absolutely hook you up. You'll be very glad you made the move with him at the tiller.
 
yeah, im not sure what gallery you were using.....but it really gets to a point about now.....where it will cost more to stay than to go....even if there is custom work involved there will be for ppl who stay on vb4 too anyway so there isnt much logic behind staying anymore.....

fwiw...you can still run xen along side your old forum after moving, so the images will still load in content and be available but yes there are a couple steps from start to end...
 
Thank you Marc. The thing is I haven't bought XF yet and therefore I don't have a license. Before purchasing I was wanting advice/quote on costs of migrating my current VBulletin/Photopost forum. I don't wish to purchase until I have some sort of idea of the costs that I will be up for. Unfortunately most of the people who are offering their services for this type of thing only post in the Customer forums, which I guess is not helpful to my situation.
 
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