Questions about migrating from vB4

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Dimitrios

Dimitrios

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Hello everyone.

I’m running a vB4 forum and it just looks terrible on mobile devices. This, to my feeling, is a major drawback. I surely don’t want to upgrade to vB5. I've seen people suffering with it.

So, I'm thinking about migrating either to xenforo or to IPS.

I do have a couple of questions, though.

1 ⁃ My domainname consists of greek letters. Would xenforo be able to handle that correctly?
2 ⁃ Is it 100% suitable for mobile devices?
3 ⁃ Right now I have a front page where I mostly host articles. Can I have that here, too?
4 ⁃ Can I have tabs? (right now I have tabs like: frontpage / forum etc)
5 ⁃ Is it easy and straightforward to migrate from vB4.2.5?
6 ⁃ Am i going to have support during the process?
7 ⁃ How much data is going to be preserved after migrating? (I'm reffering to stuff like post counters, avatars, ranks, titles, polls, emoticons etc.)
8 ⁃ Can I have custom BB codes, like for spoilers, using the same tags I use now?
9 ⁃ What happens to URLs? I mean, there’s a lot of incoming backlinking. That’s also appreciated by search engines. What happens to all that?

I hope I am not tiring you.
I'd really appreciate your answers.

Thanks
 
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All of that shouldn't be an issue.

There is a dedicated importer which will import all standard content and redirection scripts available for existing URLs.

We don't provide official ticket support for imports, but there is a dedicated forum where you can obtain community based assistance (as well as XF staff helping).

We also have a reasonable refund policy so you can purchase XF, test out the import and if you find it's not going to work for you, we can refund.
 
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Dimitrios said:
8 ⁃ Can I have custom BB codes, like for spoilers, using the same tags I use now?
Click to expand...
I've had this issue on a few forums I converted several years ago. You may need help from fellow members here if you need to do a search/replace operation and use some regular expressions to find them all, but it certainly is possible. I came from vB 3.7 and am pleased that just about everything we had in the old forum was transferred over properly. Best bet is to set up a forum for testing, using your existing vB4 data, and do a few test runs of the conversion.
 
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I'm interested in a possible forum switch from Vb to Xenforo. Biggest reason really is mobile-ready templates. My traffic has tanked since Google started mobile first indexing.
 
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Mr Lucky said:
I know there is no actual question here, but the answer is "good idea!"
Click to expand...

Jesus I'm ADHD these days. There actually was supposed to be a question here, which was does anyone offer migration services?

Apologize for the scatterbrained thoughts - I just started seriously considering this a few days ago so I'm thinking of feasibility.

site is forums.alpinezone.com

I have a few concerns about the upgrade:

  1. I have a WP front end which I use to publish news and blog articles - does anything like this exist? I did see a Xenforo / WP bridge in a quick google search.
  2. I'm using Tapatalk which works well enough, I assume it's easy to switch to the Xenforo plugin for tapatalk?
  3. My styling is kind of dated now but I do want to keep a consistent look. What kind of styling options exist as far as backgrounds etc. Right now I keep my "menu bar" identical between the forum side and the Wordpress side , which is kinda tedious because i have to basically manage the menu in two locations (wordpress theme and Vbulletin).
For those who have switched, did you see organic search traffic increase?
 
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Yes there are a couple of bridge Addons, I think at least one of them will keep a consistent style between the two. I also think tapatalk has an addon, but I dropped tapatalk as soon as I moved from vb to xf, couldn't wait to get rid of it.

Yes traffic and ad revenue is up.
 
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Dimitrios said:
Are there step by step instructions about how to migrate from vBulletin 4 to Xenforo?
Click to expand...
For myself, I decided not to sweat that and instead hired @MySiteGuy to take care of it, turnkey. And it's the best decision I ever made having migrated many phpBB sites to vB over the years and knowing what a PITA migration can sometimes be. His price is righteous, his service is great, he is trustworthy and will take good care of you. Might I suggest contacting him and getting lots of questions answered, at the very least. He's done this lots.
 
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Thanks, Slavik.

I just bought a licence.

These import notes are not exactly step by step instructions.

Here's my plan. First I will install the latest version of Xenforo. Then install the import plugin (I'll look for instructions) like you suggest. In the meanwhile I am going to look for more instructions.
 
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