vB3 Admin - Misc Inquiries about XenForo…

[adwade]

I have run vB3 for over a decade and am looking into XenForo now. I have requested a DEMO and played with it a bit, but don't quite understand a thing or two…

Namely,
1)Under Display Location it states "These fields will never be displayed on a user's profile."
Does that mean PROFILE FIELDS can not be part of a users viewable profile? If so, it sort of defeats the purpose for our needs.

2)Is there anyway to import a set of choices for a drop-down selection?
I ask, because we run a bicycling website where each user declares their state/country & region within the state/country (i.e. N,NE,NW,S,SE,SW,E,W), so folks can sort of find one another. In vB3 I just copied/pasted a list of all States & Countries for my drop-down choices. In XenForo, it looks like you add each choice manually?

3)Also, is there a limit to the number of choices and if so what is that limit?(i.e. Enough for ALL States & Countries)

 

[Chris D]

1. It is specifically the "Preferences" display location that is never displayed on a user profile.
2. There is no way to import them into the Admin CP. It's worth noting that our vBulletin 3 importer will import custom fields, their choices and values automatically.
3. There is no limit to the number of choices.

 

[adwade]

Well that's ALL good news then! In my mind it should probably say: "This field will never be displayed on a user's profile", but I understand what you're saying now.

One other brief inquiry, somewhere I read something about the importing process but have lost exactly where I saw it at. In short, it stated something like you can't (or don't want to) do multiple imports from another board's software. However to feel pretty comfortable with it, if I purchased XenForo could I do an import from vB3, then play around with it for awhile to get used to it behind the scenes. Then at some point wipe the import and re-import anew for a fresh start? In short, I'm saying I'd like to have all imported data in XenForo to play around with on the side while my vB3 continues to run as normal. Once I'm more confident with XenForo, then I would be ready to take the 'public' plunge and migrate everything across from vB3.

 

[Chris D]

In short, I'm saying I'd like to have all imported data in XenForo to play around with on the side while my vB3 continues to run as normal. Once I'm more confident with XenForo, then I would be ready to take the 'public' plunge and migrate everything across from vB3.

Yes, that's exactly how we would recommend doing it.

1. Keep VB3 running as normal.
2. Install XF, e.g. yoursite.com/xf
3. Probably best to close VB3 briefly (or work from a copy/backup of the VB3 database) and use the XF importer to bring that across.
4. Test XF for as long as you need to.
5. Once ready, close VB3, wipe XF and then do the import again.
6. Archive off VB3, make XF live. Enjoy

 

[adwade]

MY HISTORY: Back in 2004 several of us started communicating on a Yahoo Group and after a few years we finally evolved into starting Recumbent Riders International. While I had run a BBS via dialup (i.e. The Tutorboard) back in the days before the internet, I was vaguely aware of what it might take to create an online forum for our discussions. Luckily, we tripped across the vBulletin software which has always ran like a champ for us. While I'm not a 'coder,' by utilizing some MODS on vB.org (and enough trial & errors), we managed to customize the software so it's worked well for our purposes. I know little about PHP or MySQL and even less about xml and css, so most of my 'tweaking' has been limited to revising, or inserting code snippets here and there. Now, I say ALL that just so others can (sort of) understand where I'm coming from when I'm asking more questions here.​

That said, I'm gonna have a lot of dumb questions for awhile until I figure some more things out…

4)On our website, we have a Zero-Tolerence for Spam and one of the things we'd managed to do is get the 'report post' button to automatically put the post back into the moderation que for approval. Does XenForo do that, or is there a MOD for making it act that way?

5)On our website, one of the censored characters is the 'at' symbol.(i.e. @) That way, users don't lose their email address to harvesters/scrappers…and it discourages folks from publically posting their email address. I know that XenForo allows one to use it to identify another user in a post (@Chris D), but would that cause any other problems if we chose to keep the 'at' symbol as a censored character when using XenForo?

 

[adwade]

Archive off VB3, make XF live. Enjoy

When you say Archive off vB3, exactly what do you mean?
I assume XenForo will import ALL our threads/posts, so I just figured once it ran successfully for a month or so I'd delete vB3 off our server.

 

[Chris D]

There probably isn't many dumb questions you can ask. All fair so far!

4) XenForo has some very powerful anti spam tools. Actually the ideal is you won't get as many spam registrations through tools such as the registration timer, honeypot registration fields, and various API integrations during registration. Most of these should either get automatically moderated or rejected. Those that slip through there are some tools which will potentially block or automatically moderate the content. One such tool is Spam Phrases. You could actually use this to moderate posts that contain links or certain words. We also have an integration with Akismet which will scan content for potential spam. The usage of that might even be free depending on the exact usage. There's a threshold of 5 posts by default so after a user has made 5 posts they are no longer checked for spam. There might be an add on that sends back to the mod queue on report, I'm not sure. But for the most part spam should be sent to the moderation queue automatically with the spam settings set up correctly.

5) This could be problematic but there is a setting that might help. The @ character will trigger mentions and by default mentioned names will keep the @ character but there is a setting to remove the tag character automatically. The end result (if I mentioned you for real) would be: adwade

When you say Archive off vB3, exactly what do you mean?
I assume XenForo will import ALL our threads/posts, so I just figured once it ran successfully for a month or so I'd delete vB3 off our server.

Basically that. Keep VB3 for period of time, then delete it when you are finished with it.

 

[0ptima]

4)On our website, we have a Zero-Tolerence for Spam and one of the things we'd managed to do is get the 'report post' button to automatically put the post back into the moderation que for approval. Does XenForo do that, or is there a MOD for making it act that way?

This addon will do that
[XenMods] Crowd Moderation

 

[adwade]

Two features we've been relying on for a while are: 6)Caching of offsite images and 7)Automatic Word-Linking.

6)I've read a little about XenForo's Image Proxy Feature, but can't find anyting in the manual about it. What I think I read here is that it would keep a copy of offsite images for us, similar to how this MOD has done so for us in vB3. Correct? If not, is there any MOD available for XenForo to copy any referenced offsite image within a post and keep it on our website? We use this feature so older threads are still easily readable with ALL the info they originally referenced, regardless if the original image or referenced website is now missing.

7)Automatic Word-Linking - We use this feature to help educate newbies and bring folks up-to-speed faster when first learning about recumbent cycles. In perusing the MODS for XenForo, it looks like Keyword Management would do what this MOD does for us now under vB3. Correct? If not, are there other MODS I've overlooked that could do this for us?

These are probably the two most important features we don't want to lose when leaving vB3.

 

[adwade]

This addon will do that
[XenMods] Crowd Moderation

Perfect and I found the 'watch this resource' link as well so I can maintain a list of MODs to keep an eye on!

 

[m1ne]

Two features we've been relying on for a while are: 6)Caching of offsite images and 7)Automatic Word-Linking.

6)I've read a little about XenForo's Image Proxy Feature, but can't find anyting in the manual about it. What I think I read here is that it would keep a copy of offsite images for us, similar to how this MOD has done so for us in vB3. Correct? If not, is there any MOD available for XenForo to copy any referenced offsite image within a post and keep it on our website? We use this feature so older threads are still easily readable with ALL the info they originally referenced, regardless if the original image or referenced website is now missing.
.

You can use MetaMirror
Image Proxy is ideal for SSL, and will keep it on your server unless it isn't accessed for a certain amount of time.

 

[m1ne]

7)Automatic Word-Linking - We use this feature to help educate newbies and bring folks up-to-speed faster when first learning about recumbent cycles. In perusing the MODS for XenForo, it looks like Keyword Management would do what this MOD does for us now under vB3. Correct? If not, are there other MODS I've overlooked that could do this for us?

This seems to be for you -> [by PiX-house.com] Keyword Management

 

[adwade]

4) XenForo has some very powerful anti spam tools. Actually the ideal is you won't get as many spam registrations through tools such as the registration timer, honeypot registration fields, and various API integrations during registration. Most of these should either get automatically moderated or rejected.

Agreed.

In our decade of running, we've only had a few human spammers post to the board by utilizing everything you mentioned except the registration timer.(We had some issues when folks would revise just one incorrect field, reloading the registration page too fast, so we chose not to utilize it.)

In our very few cases of spam, the community of users nailed the posts instantly and it was removed from sight until I got home from from work to deal with it. Thanxx go out to Optima for recommending that MOD to me!

 

[adwade]

You can use MetaMirror
Image Proxy is ideal for SSL, and will keep it on your server unless it isn't accessed for a certain amount of time.

Thanxx for the clarification above, as I remember seeing the term MetaMirror mentioned somewhere in my perusings around here. Now I'm off to read the discussion about it, to see what happens if a remote image can't be downloaded for any reason(s).

 

[m1ne]

Thanxx for the clarification above, as I remember seeing the term MetaMirror mentioned somewhere in my perusings around here. Now I'm off to read the discussion about it, to see what happens if a remote image can't be downloaded for any reason(s).

I never encountered any issue like that, it worked great when I used it.
Oh, and regarding your anti-spam concerns, I posted a resource about blocking it all. Block spam COMPLETELY with no addons

 

[adwade]

Thanxx for the Block Spam Completely resource you listed Solidus. I added it to my watch list and will read it once I gain access to the full article.

For now, at least I can read through the discussion about it!

 

[adwade]

From what I understand, things like embedded video previews won't survive the conversion process, so my assumption is such items are handled using Video code after import. So things like youtube and vimeo I expect to 'fix' after the conversion process.

8)My question is, what other things have vB users had not convert that they had to somehow fix-up?

Will things like blinking text, mono-text, hi-lighted text and strike-thru text be alright?

Is there any support for keeping our existing TAGS with the threads, during the conversion process?

 

[Chris D]

Yeah we really don't touch much by way of the post content, so it tends to come over as is, in most cases.

The solution for videos is pretty simple, as you can see.

Anything that doesn't have a BB code in XF won't come across. We don't have a blinking text, mono-text, highlighted text bb code. We do have a strike-through bb code, though, so that should be alright as long as it is the same tag, e.g. [s]this produces strike through[/s]

produces:

this produces strike through

XenForo 1.5 is not yet released. This supports thread tags. We haven't added support for importing tags, yet. They will be lost unless you use a third party importer. There is actually an add-on which people have been using for thread tags in recent years, XenTag. This imports tags from vBulletin (I think). There's also recently been several importers released which import those into XF 1.5's new tag system. A bit convoluted but definitely a valid solution.

 

[adwade]

Anything that doesn't have a BB code in XF won't come across. We don't have a blinking text, mono-text, highlighted text bb code. We do have a strike-through bb code, though, so that should be alright as long as it is the same tag

Good deal, worse case I should be able to use the Post Content Find/Replace resource to revise my highlighted text over to bold, etc.

But what about adding New BB Codes? It looks like it's an option in the Admin-CP if I understand correctly. If I had (for instance) a [mono] tag defined (before I imported from vB3) would it support such then?

 

[Chris D]

Yes, absolutely. Most of the ones you mentioned should be easily reproducible in XF using the Custom BB Codes feature.

I should clarify my earlier comment: If your posts contain a [mono] bb code in VB3, those posts will import as is. Meaning that bb code will remain unparsed, like this[/mono]. However, as soon as you create that as a custom bb code in XF, those posts will start parsing that new bb code straight away.

That said, I assume [mono] is monospaced text?

In which case, you might actually want to use the Post Content Find / Replace add-on to convert them to [code] tags instead.

This is probably the closest equivalent to [mono] in XenForo