Questions Regarding Setting up a Forum (Large Mobile Game)

[Baroquian]

I'm interested in switching my forum software from Discuz to either XenForo or vBulletin, but I have a few questions first (since this also affects my ability to get this approved).

Our current forum: http://forum.sok.proximabeta.com/forum.php

• What's the biggest difference between vBulletin and XenForo?
• Our in-house developers are Chinese, so they'd need some type of Chinese documentation to properly implement vBulletin. Is there a place that contains Chinese documentation?
• If there isn't, do you know of any great third-party devs or your own official devs that could help us implement and design the forum?
• We have our own in-house designers, so potentially if we had designers over here working with devs on your end to implement this, would that be a challenge?
• Would we be able to import our current threads/data from the existing forum onto the new vBulletin forum?
• The main goal is to be able to have a functioning game forum that is optimized for mobile and PC. We also want to add a variety of forum ranks, post ratings, add some gamification to make players more active on the forum. Would you or the third-party dev be able to suggest certain plugins for this?
• For hosting options, what would be required if we wanted to host the forum on our own company internal servers (we're Tencent located in Shenzhen, China) or would we host the forum on your servers?
• If we host on your servers, what security protocols/assurances would you be able to provide?

Thanks so much! I look forward to getting a better idea of this and potentially purchasing a license ASAP.

 

[sheel]

Hi

What's the biggest difference between vBulletin and XenForo?

...well, I can't answer that.

How about "Xenforo is better"

Is there a place that contains Chinese documentation?

No, at least no official place.

do you know of any great third-party devs or your own official devs that could help us implement and design the forum?

Just look into the resource section ... some poeple are hireable.

Would we be able to import our current threads/data from the existing forum onto the new vBulletin forum?

Importing from Discuz will need a custom importer, I think there is none yet.

For hosting options, what would be required if we wanted to host the forum on our own company internal servers (we're Tencent located in Shenzhen, China) or would we host the forum on your servers?
If we host on your servers, what security protocols/assurances would you be able to provide?

You need your own server, Xenforo doesn't host customer sites.
Xenforo needs a somewhat current version of PHP, Apache, and MariaDB/MySQL, and folling PHP extensions and settings:

MySQLi, GD (with JPEG support), PCRE, SPL, SimpleXML, DOM, JSON, iconv, ctype
safe_mode off

Other than that, I'd recommend waiting a bit until Xenforo 2 comes out.

 

[karll]

Other than that, I'd recommend waiting a bit until Xenforo 2 comes out.

There are already "developer preview" releases of XF2 which are available to all customers. You can already now start looking at those to see what it's like. There is no upgrade path for these to the official release, but once a release candidate (or beta version?) is out, you can start doing serious work.

XF's own XF2 installation is up and running here: http://xf2demo.xenforo.com/