Small Community Looks to Kickstart their XenForo Transition

[Hentai]

So yea, maybe some of you will get a laugh at this one.

Yes, compared to its competitors XenForo is not all that expensive and very reasonably priced for what it is our community is primarily 13-17 year olds so we didn't feel comfortable using the traditional donation schemes most other boards use. One of our rival message boards recently had a scandal of PayPal donation fraud so instead, so instead, to fund our transition to XenForo, we made a Kickstarter campaign.

http://kck.st/1jPUvvj

And yea our goal size is so ridiculously small we were actually rejected from IndieGoGo. Our running joke is we were to "indie" for the site. We figured with our community it was best to set the goal as low as possible, just the base forum licence to start, then backload the plugins we wanted to licence in our stretch goals.

As for the video, my god that was cheese as hell, but we figured it was better to play up the ham (thus the Google Hangouts) than try to do something we could not. Figured better to have a video so bad its funny, that our community could later laugh about then look lazy and have no video at all.

Feedback welcome. What do you think of this approach as XenForo administrators?

 

[Chris D]

I was flattered that one of your stretch goals was to purchase Xen Media Gallery, so I made a $10 contribution. I hope it gets you one step closer to becoming a XenForo customer

 

[Hentai]

One of the primary reasons we liked XenForo over its competitors was the extensive Add-Ons available for the software. Judging by the Resources add-on reviews XenForo seems to have a great community of devs making (and supporting) their add-ons. While the 'free' open source plugins on other platforms are nice one can't undervalue good support.

Less than 24 hours in we are 70% to our goal. I have no doubt by the end of the Kickstarter we will be successful and by project's end I am sure we will be many of your customers soon.

 

[Null]

TAZ has pledged $34 to help you hit $275.

 

[Hentai]

I still can't believe we funded so quickly! I knew we would fund, I just didn't expect it to be within the first 24 hours.

Anyways last night we did our first project update and I did a Video Blog trying to sell our stretch goals and the various plugins we wanted to implement to our XenForo. So far it seems pretty well received.

Next is to decide how much (if any) of our old database we want to take with us. Is it possible to only take the users table? I wonder if the users table is even worth porting over with al those 01/01/0001 birthdays from our SMF to MyBB transition.

 

[Jeremy]

You can import your database from MyBB using the built in importers. Such software changes, if possible, shouldn't remove content (the life blood of any forum).

Once you purchase a license, you should perform a few test imports to see how everything transitions over, and see the pre-sales FAQ in my signature for a list of items that are imported from MyBB.

 

[=MGN=RedEagle]

Cool idea! Hope it works out!