My experience migrating big board from vB 3.8 to xenforo

[Ntown]

SportsHoopla.com

I've been contemplating a move to xenforo for years now and always held off because my community is largely made up of posters who hate change.

MattW helped me every step of the way with everything. Let me say that he has been a total blessing. I'm even guessing that this little testimonial will garner me a massive discount on his fees (if he even decides to charge me at all)! He did everything, including server setup and migration.

napy8gen did the import of our vBulletin style and it's perfect. Couldn't be happier!

My biggest concerns were:
a.) member hating the change and revolting
b.) overall revenue plummeting
c.) the import on 6.2M posts being a nightmare

On a scale of 1-to-10, 1 being disastrous and 10 being best-case scenario, my experience has been a 10+.

On every level, I'm BLOWN AWAY.

Members who've been on the site for over 5 years and I assumed would respond negatively really like it.

I did the import myself with the built-in importer and it went flawlessly (took about 6 hrs to do 6.2M posts).

New features and addons are mindblowingly good.

Let me put this in perspective: We just traded our 1984 Ford in for a 2015 Ferrari.

 

[Amaury]

Welcome to XenForo.

 

[Ntown]

Site added to OP if you wanna see what I'm so proud of!

 

[JamesBrown]

Looking good. what Mod is that which shows the latest/most replied/etc at the top of forum home?

 

[Ntown]

Looking good. what Mod is that which shows the latest/most replied/etc at the top of forum home?

******* Modern Statistics

 

[Claudio]

******* Modern Statistics

Be careful, he has a bad reputation here and all his addons have been removed

 

[Ntown]

Be careful, he has a bad reputation here and all his addons have been removed

For what it's worth, I got what I paid for and friendly support as well.

Got Sportsbook added and continuing to LOVE the new site. Response has been overwhelming.

 

[Ntown]

More plugs for napy8gen and MattW.

There was miscommunication in the bid process for what I wanted napy8gen to do and it was considerably more work than he realized but he offered to include it at no extra cost. I mean A LOT more work. I'm going to meet him in the middle, but again, he was prepared to do it pro bono.

MattW continues to do everything asked of him and more at a reasonable cost. I can't imagine having done this without him. But he's mine so please don't distract him from my project.

 

[Ntown]

Can you believe that according to Google Analytics, search engine referrals since the migration to xenforo are actually up slightly compared to the previous period? How can this be?

 

[Ridemonkey]

Can you believe that according to Google Analytics, search engine referrals since the migration to xenforo are actually up slightly compared to the previous period? How can this be?

Could be a small sample size (i.e. not caused by the XF move), could be slightly better page structure and SEO so you're ranking a little higher, could be that your users are linking to the site from elsewhere because something noteworthy happened (e.g. "woah, have you seen the new software at sportshoopla.com??") and thus boosting your page rank a little...

 

[Ntown]

I thought some of you might find this interesting. It shows CDN bandwidth before/after the migration. Does it illustrate well how much better xenforo integrates with the CDN?

 

[Ntown]

Via Google Webmaster Tools. Can you spot when the migration to XF was?

 

[Ntown]

Thought an update was in order...

Now on 1.4.8 and aside from the obnoxious email validation issues (posters locked out because their email address is deemed invalid) I only have positive things to say after about 120 days on the software.

The effects have been incredible on user engagement. We're able to totally control our biggest challenge which is alt accounts. Between user group promotions and a paid addon, we're batting 1.000 on alts trying tget thru. They can't do it anymore. Now, instead of discouraging new posters, the doors are wide open. Increased activity has led to many who were alienated from the community seeing it's fun again and coming back. Now competing communities are slowly folding and when it happens, they come to us.

The community is in auto-pilot, only needing subtle adjustments from time-to-time.

If ONLY I had done this a year sooner.