Vbulletin4 to XenForo - 8 years old community

msolano

msolano

Active member
Hello: I dont like what is hapenning to vbseo and vbulletin5 isn't what I expected. My plugins are getting abandoned by authors and with new vbulletin4.x upgrades they dont work anymore. Photopost is behind by far vs other gallery solutions. The darkness is over me :sick:

My community is about aquarism, 6688 users with +/- 200 users daily (20-30 at the same time), Spanish.

Now.. there're some forum software out there but XenForo seems to be a great one, with more and more features, web responsive is a must right now and you got it!!! Freelance developers put their eyes over this and is getting better... BUT

1. My site have more than 50 articles. I love to have a portal with articles, new threats, tag cloud, etc.
2. My gallery has 17.966 photographies. I love to have some of the thumbnails in my forum or in the portal.

I'm worry about having to get plugins that can be abandoned by authors.
I'm worry about how to migrate Photopost gallery to xxxxxx (whatever)
I'm worry about having to migrate one by one my articles.

I need some advices about this. What solutions can I use? Future plans for portal, CMS, or gallery?
 
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I have to say that this is the best move since I migrated from phpBB to vb3 in 2007 :rolleyes:

Xenforo is elegant, light, full of features, a lot of high quality addons (I have installed as 10 and more already downloaded), give control over everything the user do, the responsive feature is terrific.

As forum software, Xenforo is the best. Thank you so much for this software :cry: 1000000% recommended
 
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msolano said:
I have to say that this is the best move since I migrated from phpBB to vb3 in 2007 :rolleyes:

Xenforo is elegant, light, full of features, a lot of high quality addons (I have installed as 10 and more already downloaded), give control over everything the user do, the responsive feature is terrific.

As forum software, Xenforo is the best. Thank you so much for this software :cry: 1000000% recommended
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Only problem is it is addictive. I've got 3 barely used forums that are currently on myBB... and I keep getting this weird urge to splurge and get licenses for them also (even though they don't have any users and I don't really have time to fully participate in them right now). :p
 
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Tracy Perry said:
Only problem is it is addictive. I've got 3 barely used forums that are currently on myBB... and I keep getting this weird urge to splurge and get licenses for them also (even though they don't have any users and I don't really have time to fully participate in them right now). :p
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You can't escape it. I had the same problem and I resisted as long as I could. I now own 6 licenses and half of them are for forums that don't really do much.
 
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Dakis said:
You can't escape it. I had the same problem and I resisted as long as I could. I now own 6 licenses and half of them are for forums that don't really do much.
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Yeah, I did the next best thing recently. I had set up a site because my son wanted one (mustangbit.com) and he ended up never using it... so I just took it off-line (will probably end up putting either myBB there or a gallery for him) and moved that license over to my servinglinux.com one. I'm hoping that one takes off as I really enjoy using Linux and help others out as frequently as I can.
 
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Rudy said:
Nice work @msolano ! But please promise us that you will backup your database and data directories regularly. Our host automatically backs it up for us, so I don't need to worry.
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You hope... several other forum owners hosts backed theirs up for them also.... and when it came to the crunch the backups were trash. If you want to be safe, you back up your own - that way you know it's done.

Nothing like needing a backup restored and thinking "Great, my host has it backed up for me" and then finding out that yes, but they might as well not have since it can't be recovered because the backups are bad.
 
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Yeah guys. I'm doing my own backups and I payed for 4 backup slots in my provider (linode.. I hope not a problem saying the name) hehehehe :ROFLMAO:

Everyday I check for updates of my O.S. and double check /tmp directories and I do 'find . -name *.php' in my 777 directories :)
I run rkhunter, check iptables, logs, etc.

May be the hacker is waiting a time to attack again my server but this time I don't have bananas to counter-attack and I'm not sleeping (one eye open all the time o_O)
 
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msolano said:
Yeah guys. I'm doing my own backups and I payed for 4 backup slots in my provider (linode.. I hope not a problem saying the name) hehehehe :ROFLMAO:

Everyday I check for updates of my O.S. and double check /tmp directories and I do 'find . -name *.php' in my 777 directories :)
I run rkhunter, check iptables, logs, etc.

May be the hacker is waiting a time to attack again my server but this time I don't have bananas to counter-attack and I'm not sleeping (one eye open all the time o_O)
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I had a similar experience with vbulletin & Dos attacks. Once I did a clean install of xenforo on my new server & imported the database, all attacks stopped immediately. I am extremely hopeful that the worst is behind me. I serve a website for 8,000+ users with over 600,000 posts so it was a nightmare to think I lost all that in the attacks. Luckily with regular routine backups & world class hosting support, I managed to migrate in a days time. I will never look back to another forum software as long as xexnforo keeps pressing forward. The developers here are excellent with routine updates & listening to what the community is asking for.

Every so often I reach out to some devs for custom work & the quotes are more than fair for what I am expecting. I think you made the right move from one new xenforo user (about 5 months in) to another.

Regards,
~Mike
 
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Tracy Perry said:
You hope... several other forum owners hosts backed theirs up for them also.... and when it came to the crunch the backups were trash. If you want to be safe, you back up your own - that way you know it's done.

Nothing like needing a backup restored and thinking "Great, my host has it backed up for me" and then finding out that yes, but they might as well not have since it can't be recovered because the backups are bad.
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You are wise: you need a backup schedule but more important: you need to test backups, know it works and how to fast restore them.

After installing a lot of add-ons my site is working as I dreamed. Zero spam, Zero problems with add-ons (my vb4 experience was terrible: disabling add-ons all the time 'cause they create malfunctions of other add-ons or the forum itself).

I'm very excited to know @Kier and @Mike are working hard to bring us xf 1.3. I'm very happy with the software, the environment in xenforo.com and how the people helps each other. I never look back and I know this is going to be greater and bigger than is right now.
 
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msolano - please can you tell me which folder on your site contains the articles that previously exists on your VB4 CMS? I'd like to see how they end up. What steps did you go through / addons etc. for this article conversion?

And now you've been up and running for a few weeks, is there any other advice you could give? Thanks.
 
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All the articles are into subforums because I used this importer to migrate the groups and articles. They need some work and they are into hidden subforums. The same happens with groups and albums.

I installed this editor and these bbcodes to get a better format for my articles.

I installed Xenporta to publish my articles and to give them a great format. Look:
  1. About goldfish
  2. A guide about freshwater aquarium
You can see a normal thread here. Did you see the difference? :) The imported subforums are just normal threads but you can 'Promote' them to publish it in the portal and to get the 'article' look.

Obviously they can have a better look but it needs time and I have so few.

PD: sorry for my English
 
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