I've been running a local Motorcycle forum for the past 6 and a half years here in Canberra. In that time, we started with PHPBB and a couple of years in moved to VBulletin.
I moved it to VB at the time because it was the biggest and most supported forum software out there.
Oh, how times have changed.
Whilst the core VB team seemed to be more interested in developing all the other 'frilly' bits around the core forum application, I couldn't help but feel that many of the third party and community developers where just loosing faith in what should have been their core product - the forum.
Over the last couple of years, so many of the plugins that I relied on stopped being supported/updated as developers left.
I'm not a coder at all. I can fudge my way through a fix, but that's about it; so I rely on these add-ons to 'make stuff work' and keep my community running. Add-ons (in some cases) that I've spent good money on.
Then late last week I installed the latest update and found two of my most important add-ons horribly break (BBR Events Forum and VBPro Garage <- whos domain isnt even registered anymore).
The last straw.
Following some rapid research, I announced I was taking the forum offline while I did some testing and a migration.
The Migration of the core forum could not have been easier. It 'just worked'. Sadly, both the Garage and the User Galleries I had to ditch and start from scratch (although XenGallery has an import function, spammers had made such a mess of the old VB albums, it just horribly broke on import - not their fault).
I've chosen Bob B's Showcase to replace the Garage and have picked up the XF version of Vaultwiki. I've had a few little probs, but both developers (@Bob B and @pegasus) have been terrific!
So, as I said on FB, Xenforo has been much more intuitive to use and manage. My users have already been praising it substantially. And the idea of concentrating on making simply the best forum software and leaving all the frilly bits to third party dev's but giving them (as far as I can tell) easy access to 'hook in', has *really* paid off.
Cheers,
Lurch
I moved it to VB at the time because it was the biggest and most supported forum software out there.
Oh, how times have changed.
Whilst the core VB team seemed to be more interested in developing all the other 'frilly' bits around the core forum application, I couldn't help but feel that many of the third party and community developers where just loosing faith in what should have been their core product - the forum.
Over the last couple of years, so many of the plugins that I relied on stopped being supported/updated as developers left.
I'm not a coder at all. I can fudge my way through a fix, but that's about it; so I rely on these add-ons to 'make stuff work' and keep my community running. Add-ons (in some cases) that I've spent good money on.
Then late last week I installed the latest update and found two of my most important add-ons horribly break (BBR Events Forum and VBPro Garage <- whos domain isnt even registered anymore).
The last straw.
Following some rapid research, I announced I was taking the forum offline while I did some testing and a migration.
The Migration of the core forum could not have been easier. It 'just worked'. Sadly, both the Garage and the User Galleries I had to ditch and start from scratch (although XenGallery has an import function, spammers had made such a mess of the old VB albums, it just horribly broke on import - not their fault).
I've chosen Bob B's Showcase to replace the Garage and have picked up the XF version of Vaultwiki. I've had a few little probs, but both developers (@Bob B and @pegasus) have been terrific!
So, as I said on FB, Xenforo has been much more intuitive to use and manage. My users have already been praising it substantially. And the idea of concentrating on making simply the best forum software and leaving all the frilly bits to third party dev's but giving them (as far as I can tell) easy access to 'hook in', has *really* paid off.
Cheers,
Lurch
He also is great on support of it.
