Overscan
Active member
Well, I've stuck with SMF for 13 years, and I bought a license and nearly completed the migration to Xenforo a year ago and gave up. When my license expired I nearly decided to leave it be, but decided to renew my license for another year. My new test migration is awesome. Everyone's been very helpful with my questions and I'm really looking forward to the final shutdown and migration of my site, which is planned for 2nd March.
In the process I've had to hack my MySQL database and rewrite some lines of the SMF importer. I work in IT, and I've written scripts and small utilities in my time, so nothing was too tricky, but I think it would be useful to do a "Guide to importing from SMF to Xenforo" which summarizes the stuff I've learned which would help others (and possibly assist with coding a native 2.0 import for SMF, if that is on the cards). I've even switched to nginx after 13 years on Apache2
Useful?
Thinking about why I didn't upgrade 4 years ago, when I lost faith in SMF ever going anywhere, I would say that I actually tried importing my forum to MyBB and several other free forum systems, but none were actually better than SMF for my use case. That left paid forums, and even 4 years ago I'd identified Xenforo as the obvious choice - but I was just reluctant to buy it without having used it.
Now I've converted my forum over, and am configuring it, I appreciate how well written it is, how easy to configure and administer. None of those were things I got out of a brief sandbox demo - it needed my content in it before I could appreciate how well it worked compared to what I had.
I guess I'm saying, you would probably sell more copies if there was a way to obtain a copy, limited in some way, that allowed you to migrate from an existing forum without spending a lot of money up front. Maybe a 30 day migration-only license at say $30 which you then get discounted off the actual purchase.
Anyways, thanks, Xenforo developers, for some great work
In the process I've had to hack my MySQL database and rewrite some lines of the SMF importer. I work in IT, and I've written scripts and small utilities in my time, so nothing was too tricky, but I think it would be useful to do a "Guide to importing from SMF to Xenforo" which summarizes the stuff I've learned which would help others (and possibly assist with coding a native 2.0 import for SMF, if that is on the cards). I've even switched to nginx after 13 years on Apache2
Useful?
Thinking about why I didn't upgrade 4 years ago, when I lost faith in SMF ever going anywhere, I would say that I actually tried importing my forum to MyBB and several other free forum systems, but none were actually better than SMF for my use case. That left paid forums, and even 4 years ago I'd identified Xenforo as the obvious choice - but I was just reluctant to buy it without having used it.
Now I've converted my forum over, and am configuring it, I appreciate how well written it is, how easy to configure and administer. None of those were things I got out of a brief sandbox demo - it needed my content in it before I could appreciate how well it worked compared to what I had.
I guess I'm saying, you would probably sell more copies if there was a way to obtain a copy, limited in some way, that allowed you to migrate from an existing forum without spending a lot of money up front. Maybe a 30 day migration-only license at say $30 which you then get discounted off the actual purchase.
Anyways, thanks, Xenforo developers, for some great work
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