Since changing to XenForo, members online down 70%

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nelson T.
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Nelson T.

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I run a site where most of the people are over 50.

Only 30% of our members are back online at our site after switching to XenForo.

I tried emailing them that we are back. I posted a notice that we will provide support if they cannot get online. I just changed the Login to a big bright button.

Anyone had this happen after the cross-over? Did the numbers pop back up? What did you do to get people back?
 
Were they more active before switch than after switch? If not, its probably just a difference in how XenForo counts online visitors compared to your old software.
 
Were they more active before switch than after switch? If not, its probably just a difference in how XenForo counts online visitors compared to your old software.

Before the switch, there were about 600 online at once, now 100-200.
 
Before the switch, there were about 600 online at once, now 100-200.

Was that 600 logged-in active members, or just 600 visitors in total (including guests and search engine spiders)? If it was an overall figure then your 100-200 may be just fine and accurate (in terms of logged-in members). (y)
 
Just to be clear are you correctly distinguishing between Members and Guests?

It's not uncommon to see the number of guests browsing drop after changing forum software because that is usually down to your visibility in Search results changing as Google starts de-indexing your old URLs and re-indexing your new URLs. Do you have any sort of redirection in place from the old URLs to the new?

It would be very unusual for the number of members to drop drastically, unless it's down to what Arty is hinting at which basically refers to how long a member is considered to be inactive before going offline.

e.g. the online status timeout for XenForo is 15 minutes. So if a user logs on and does nothing for 15 minutes, after 15 minutes, they are no longer classed as online. It may be that in vBulletin this number was much higher, thus appearing as though you had more concurrent visitors online at once (this would actually effect the numbers of guests browsing too).
 
You didn't do anything stupid like over clock.net did and change from having tapatalk to not having tapatalk did you? That's what killed their traffic in a very noticeable way to even the most casual of observers. Even if you hate it you can't drop it in a platform switch if you already had it.
 
From VB 4.2.2 PL3

I had the same thing and I am talking about active logged in members. Strange thing my age group is the same. Some feedback I did get was they could not get used to using it.

I could not get my head around this as I feel XF is far easer to use than VB
 
This is a very poor figure to go off of. Do you know if you have the time extended out to 2-5x what xf comes default as? That's what a lot of noobie admins do to bloat their activity levels.

You need to be looking at your google analytics to really see what is going on with your traffic.
 
This is a very poor figure to go off of. Do you know if you have the time extended out to 2-5x what xf comes default as? That's what a lot of noobie admins do to bloat their activity levels.

You need to be looking at your google analytics to really see what is going on with your traffic.

I reinstalled Google Analytics (which, by the way, is very easy and nice in XF) and we went from 2000 to 49 sessions...

Is it any wonder I am a nervous wreck and stressed to death?
 
I had the same thing and I am talking about active logged in members. Strange thing my age group is the same. Some feedback I did get was they could not get used to using it.

I could not get my head around this as I feel XF is far easer to use than VB

I know man, I find XF to be very intuitive, but the old, computer illiterate guys on my site can't even see to logon. It is horrendous. I am 56, not a coder, IT or computer geek, and I took to it right off. I am like WTF is going on here?
 
Was that 600 logged-in active members, or just 600 visitors in total (including guests and search engine spiders)? If it was an overall figure then your 100-200 may be just fine and accurate (in terms of logged-in members). (y)
It was 600 active logged in at any one time, except the wee hours of the night here (most of my users are from the US). I am scratching my head.....
 
Just to be clear are you correctly distinguishing between Members and Guests?

It's not uncommon to see the number of guests browsing drop after changing forum software because that is usually down to your visibility in Search results changing as Google starts de-indexing your old URLs and re-indexing your new URLs. Do you have any sort of redirection in place from the old URLs to the new?

It would be very unusual for the number of members to drop drastically, unless it's down to what Arty is hinting at which basically refers to how long a member is considered to be inactive before going offline.

e.g. the online status timeout for XenForo is 15 minutes. So if a user logs on and does nothing for 15 minutes, after 15 minutes, they are no longer classed as online. It may be that in vBulletin this number was much higher, thus appearing as though you had more concurrent visitors online at once (this would actually effect the numbers of guests browsing too).

We usually had 300 members 300 guests more or less. Now 50 members, 70 guests.

I added redirection as per the instructions. I will show you.

Here is my 301config.php:

Code:
<?php

/* ----------------------------------------------------------- *\
This variable defines where XenForo is installed.

If you have not installed XenForo into the same directory in which
vBulletin was installed, you will need to provide the full path to
the XenForo directory here. Remove the leading // and then enter
the path as in the following examples:

    $fileDir = '/home/example/public_html/new_forums';

    $fileDir = 'C:/inetpub/wwwroot/xenforo';

\* ----------------------------------------------------------- */

    $fileDir = '/home/hobbymac/public_html';

/* ----------------------------------------------------------- *\
This constant defines the table from which the import redirection
scripts will fetch their data. Normally they will use the table
'xf_import_log', but if you have archived your import data, you
should provide the name of the archive table here. Remove the
leading // and then replace 'import_log_x' with the name of your
archive table, as in the following examples:

    define('IMPORT_LOG_TABLE', 'my_import_log');

    define('IMPORT_LOG_TABLE', 'import_log_my_forums');

\* ----------------------------------------------------------- */

    define('IMPORT_LOG_TABLE', 'archived_import_log');

and here is my .htaccess

Code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^[^/]+/([0-9]+)-[^\.]+\.html$ /index.php?threads/$1/ [R=301,L]

#    Mod_security can interfere with uploading of content such as attachments. If you
#    cannot attach files, remove the "#" from the lines below.
#<IfModule mod_security.c>
#    SecFilterEngine Off
#    SecFilterScanPOST Off
#</IfModule>

ErrorDocument 401 default
ErrorDocument 403 default
ErrorDocument 404 default
ErrorDocument 405 default
ErrorDocument 406 default
ErrorDocument 500 default
ErrorDocument 501 default
ErrorDocument 503 default

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On

    #    If you are having problems with the rewrite rules, remove the "#" from the
    #    line that begins "RewriteBase" below. You will also have to change the path
    #    of the rewrite to reflect the path to your XenForo installation.
    #RewriteBase /xenforo

    #    This line may be needed to enable WebDAV editing with PHP as a CGI.
    #RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
    RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
    RewriteRule ^(data/|js/|styles/|install/|favicon\.ico|crossdomain\.xml|robots\.txt) - [NC,L]
    RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
</IfModule>


I tried to follow instructions by reading on here without bothering the mods.
 
Could be a number of things, even many not remembering their password (and not savvy enough to request a new one). However since guests are down I'd say URLs need to get re-indexed.
 
Don't worry about bothering people on here - most of us have been through a migration and some of us have experienced similar issues - so bother away! :D

I appreciate there are some visual / link differences between vB and XF but did you have a custom style in vB or did you use the default? How "radically" different is your XF layout compared with your previous vB one? (I ask because that seems to be a key issue when migrating - keeping things as familiar as possible seems to be a great help in smoothing the transition).

I note you have a notice to encourage members to contact you for help - that's good. How about recoding and posting a video of how to login and access / change your user settings? I did a couple of these and they helped - you know, that "Oh, hey, there it is ..." moment when they find a familiar feature or link in the new software.

Maybe some screen-shots to show where common links / settings are? (I noticed you've changed the New Posts link and moved it - presumably to help people get used to the change?).

Basically do anything and everything you can think of to help people find their way around - and after that, just wait for people to miss the community and get off their behinds and put the little bit of effort in to finding their way around; it's true, people really don't like change so you've got to do all you can to hold their hand until they settle in. (y)
 
It looks like your thread redirects weren't working as of this past Saturday as referenced in this post: http://www.hobby-machinist.com/thre...-seem-to-have-been-converted-correctly.32545/ although they are working now (at least for me).

You are likely going through a reindex period and with non-working redirects for some period of time you've stacked up a bunch of 404s in Google's queue. You post activity looks great to me although I don't know what it was like before. You have 3 pages of new posts from today already.
 
Could be a number of things, even many not remembering their password (and not savvy enough to request a new one). However since guests are down I'd say URLs need to get re-indexed.


Did I properly set up re-direction in the 301config.php and. htaccess files I listed above?

How would I re-index the URLs?
 
Do you have some permission errors happening? I get:

Screen Shot 2015-02-19 at 9.37.57 pm.webp

Screen Shot 2015-02-19 at 9.38.34 pm.webp

Could explain some Google issues you're having, thus subsequent traffic problems??? People can't get into your site, let alone search engines from the home page.
 
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