Oh snaps! Digitalpoint switched over to Xenforo :D

[Digital Doctor]

Digitalpoint said:

Conclusion
I've actually been surprised we have seen no drop-off whatsoever on search engine traffic (I actually was expecting a temporary drop while Google respiders the new site).

Servers are now needing about half the resources to do the same job.

If I could go back in time and redo the vBulletin -> XenForo migration (even starting before I had to rewrite all our custom stuff), would I still do it? Absolutely yes. It's one of the best decisions (although a tough one) I've ever made. The site is faster, uses less resources, and it's a much better platform to build custom stuff on top of (which is a huge factor for me).

Read the full article at:
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/one-month-after-switching-from-vbulletin-to-xenforo.2637721/

 

[Jeremy]

Conclusion
I've actually been surprised we have seen no drop-off whatsoever on search engine traffic (I actually was expecting a temporary drop while Google respiders the new site).

Servers are now needing about half the resources to do the same job.

If I could go back in time and redo the vBulletin -> XenForo migration (even starting before I had to rewrite all our custom stuff), would I still do it? Absolutely yes. It's one of the best decisions (although a tough one) I've ever made. The site is faster, uses less resources, and it's a much better platform to build custom stuff on top of (which is a huge factor for me).

Read the full article at:
https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/one-month-after-switching-from-vbulletin-to-xenforo.2637721/

It's best to use quotes when you are actually quoting someone else.

 

[IcEWoLF]

Hopefully he does. But that would be a massive amount of work.

I think its important to see that many of these functions are so essential that they need to be in the core.
I can't imagine running a big board or even a medium size board without:

• edit thread title
• email rollback
• forum sorting
• post cache
• post edit history
• thread edit history
• user change log
• user name change
• badges

And I would certainly want the following functions, before migrating to XF:

• user notes
• watch forums
• best answer
• best thread
• better editor

There are a lot of addons that are not completely clear what these do, but are likely to contain very useful features:

• little things
• attachments
• avatars
• new content filter
• no hyperlink
• premium member
• thread bumping
• enhanced search
• tools
• warning
• virtual forums

It would be interesting to know what these do...

Hopefully edit thread title get added.

 

[Digital Doctor]

I can't imagine running a big board or even a medium size board without:

• email rollback
• post cache

What are these two ?

 

[digitalpoint]

One lets a phished/hacked account rollback their email to a previous email they used and resets their password.

The other per-renders posts so it doesn't need to parse BBCode every time it's viewed.

 

[Digital Doctor]

The other pre-renders posts so it doesn't need to parse BBCode every time it's viewed.

That almost sounds 100% obvious ... is there a reason not to do that ?

 

[digitalpoint]

Takes more disk space since you are storing a parsed version of each posts. Generally I see threads rendered about twice as fast overall when you cut out the need to parse the posts on the page view).

The way I did it is a bit "cheap"... It doesn't take style, language or attachment permissions into account (I only have 1 style, 1 language, and I don't have attachments hidden from any user group, so...)

 

[Wildcat Media]

Takes more disk space since you are storing a parsed version of each posts. Generally I see threads rendered about twice as fast overall when you cut out the need to parse the posts on the page view).

The way I did it is a bit "cheap"... It doesn't take style, language or attachment permissions into account (I only have 1 style, 1 language, and I don't have attachments hidden from any user group, so...)

The pre-parsed posts feature was part of vB though, wasn't it? Or am I thinking of something else? I recall it had to create another database table for it. On a big board I can see it being of value. Our big board has not suffered without it though, but I can see if we started to reach our hardware limits, where it could be an advantage.

 

[digitalpoint]

The pre-parsed posts feature was part of vB though, wasn't it? Or am I thinking of something else? I recall it had to create another database table for it. On a big board I can see it being of value. Our big board has not suffered without it though, but I can see if we started to reach our hardware limits, where it could be an advantage.

Yeah, it was something vBulletin had and I just got used to having...

I would think that it would benefit a board of any size (faster page renders is really what it's about more than anything).

 

[Super Cat]

All I have to say is digitalpoint looks a hell of lot better here than he does at vB. And so the the lay out here over vB 5.0.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Yeah, it was something vBulletin had and I just got used to having...

I would think that it would benefit a board of any size (faster page renders is really what it's about more than anything).

That's true. We are well within the resource limits of our server currently, but we've already grown our number of online visitors by 20% since switching to XenForo. We can't always assume that we will never outgrow what we have.

I cannot honestly say if I ever saw a difference between using vB's parsed post feature, but I enabled it at a time when we were not under a lot of load. I know it can help take a load off of the web server side of things. But there may be some architectural reason that is far beyond my comprehension, for why it may not be available (beyond it not having been developed yet).

 

[digitalpoint]

That's true. We are well within the resource limits of our server currently, but we've already grown our number of online visitors by 20% since switching to XenForo. We can't always assume that we will never outgrow what we have.

I cannot honestly say if I ever saw a difference between using vB's parsed post feature, but I enabled it at a time when we were not under a lot of load. I know it can help take a load off of the web server side of things. But there may be some architectural reason that is far beyond my comprehension, for why it may not be available (beyond it not having been developed yet).

If you actually benchmark it, using pre-parsed posts is noticeably faster... (both vBulletin and XenForo). I don't remember the exact numbers, but when I benchmarked it on XenForo, it was something like threads rendered ~40% faster.

Ultimately it's a tradeoff... do you care more about speed, or more about disk space...

 

[Wildcat Media]

For the disk space, the tradeoff is minimal: I never found the parsed post table to be large enough to worry about when we were on our old server under vB. If the parsed posts are kept for a limited time (we had ours set to expire after 90 days), the table does not grow large enough to worry about IMHO.

It's a feature I'd gladly welcome in future XF versions. But for now, we have some other issues that are a lot more urgent--the staff of our big board is asking for moderator/admin features we do not yet have available. I've been overloaded lately, but I really need to assemble a list of those for reference...

 

[EasyTarget]

If you actually benchmark it, using pre-parsed posts is noticeably faster... (both vBulletin and XenForo). I don't remember the exact numbers, but when I benchmarked it on XenForo, it was something like threads rendered ~40% faster.

Ultimately it's a tradeoff... do you care more about speed, or more about disk space...

DigitalPoint what does the spam blocker add-on you created for yourself do?

 

[digitalpoint]

Some things it does is "traditional"... Akismet integration for example. Other stuff is more untraditional, and does things like blocks registrations from non-humans (bots) as well as block registrations from humans that it figures are a high probability of being a "low quality" user.

 

[digitalpoint]

Google Webmaster Tools for last 90 days of digitalpoint.com...

You can see Googlebot spidering slowly got more and more each day until it settled in around 750,000 pages/day (way up from anything it could ever do with vBulletin). Googlebot spiders more the faster the site is because it wants to make sure it's not wrecking your servers with too many requests (which is why it ramps up slowly over time).

Page rendering time WAY down under XenForo.

 

[Dakis]

Amazing stuff, thanks for posting these.

 

[p4guru]

Nice illustration Shawn of the changes since switching

 

[Liam W]

If it's good for digitalpoint, it good for everyone else

 

[Brent W]

Just want to throw out there how great it has been to have DigitalPoint move over to xenForo. His latest contribution to the search side of xenForo puts xenForo leaps and bounds ahead of every forum software out there and all for $25.

I am ecstatic to see how everything has progressed since development has returned and look forward to more DigitalPoints showing up and contributing to xenForo