Xenforo has twice the market share of vBulletin

Isn't that something all California-based businesses have to have now, with the CCPA thing going into effect?

No - CCPA is something that all websites who service visitors from California have to deal with. It is irrelevant where the business is based - it is the location of the visitor which matters.
 
Only businesses that meet at least one of the criteria items that would cause CCPA to be applicable.

You don't have annual gross revenue in excess of US$25 million? :p

Seriously though - if you have more than 50,000 unique visitors to your site each year (a pretty low threshold for most active forums) and you display advertising on your site or use third party analytics tools - you may well be affected by CCPA, if your site is accessible from anyone who is a resident of California.
 
You don't have annual gross revenue in excess of US$25 million? :p
Only if the decimal place is moved several spaces to the left! 🤣

Seriously though - if you have more than 50,000 unique visitors to your site each year (a pretty low threshold for most active forums) and you display advertising on your site or use third party analytics tools - you may well be affected by CCPA, if your site is accessible from anyone who is a resident of California.
Emphasis on the word "may"; displaying ads alone wouldn't fall under buying/selling personal info'.
 
Emphasis on the word "may"; displaying ads alone wouldn't fall under buying/selling personal info'.

I think the issue is in the wording. Some information I've read says "buying / selling". Other information includes "sharing" in that definition - it doesn't have to be explicitly buying/selling where there is money changing hands. Indeed, right now I'm dealing with Maxmind's recent change to their GeoIP2 Lite database downloads because they were advised that the act of giving away their IP geolocation database for free was the same as selling it under CCPA laws.

Displaying ads where you use a 3rd party ad provider (Adsense, Google AdX, etc) where there is tracking information used would fall under this usage.

Showing your own banner ads without any user tracking probably wouldn't.

The point being - if there is personal information from your site visitors being sent to 3rd parties, then you need to be mindful of your obligations.
 
Nice to see Xenforo is doing well.

I am one of those people that still has a vb 3 running.
I haven't moved it to xenforo yet, as I am planning on selling that site.

So no point in investing that time to port it over only to sell it.
I'll let the new owner deal with it... once I find one.
 
I inherited a site running vBulletin v4. The forum software is falling apart and I desperately need a change. I'm torn between vBulletin 5 and XenForo.

vBulletin 5 seems like it could be an easy upgrade considering the custom theme/template on my website, but I have not heard anything good about it.

XenForo sounds better, but how hard is it to import and customize XenForo to look and feel like my current vB site?
 
Lots of threads here detailing migrations from vB4 to XF 2. vBulletin is a failing platform, and is losing market share every day. XenForo is a winning platform, and taking market share from vB by the day. I also think you'll find that a vB5 migration is perhaps not as easy as it is touted to be.

It's not difficult to do the import. The XF importer works well and is well documented. It's been refined and capabilities expanded even since I did my migration just one year ago.

As far as customizing a new XF site -- that depends on what your current site looks like. There are some excellent purveyors of XF styles, to start with @Pixel Exit and @ThemeHouse, but many others. So you can buy an off-the-shelf style and modify it to suit your needs. Or you can engage a custom developer (or perhaps one of the established style vendors) to create or tweak something for your needs.

Being fair and honest, XF doesn't have all of the built-in "bells and whistles" that vB4 has. But XF also is not lacking functionality. It's sort of like buying a car without the rear-window defroster or auto-dimming rear-view mirror, or auto-sensing windshield wipers, vs. a car that has all of this stuff built in. With the minimalist car, you can still flip the switch for "night mode" on the rear view mirror, or turn on/adjust the windshield wipers ... it's just not automatic. None of it affects how the car runs and operates (what really counts), but all of it makes things just a bit more comfortable to own and drive. I have also heard (but have no direct experience) that vb5 was not as "full featured" as vB4 was -- I don't know if that is still true or not.

That said, you can get 95% of vB functionality on XF via free or inexpensive add-ons. I've implemented a number of add-ons for my forum that have brought it up (functionally) to the standard of what I had with vB. The XF developers have taken more of a "minimalist" attitude with bells and whistles .... they tend to focus on the substantive stuff that is super useful or very much user-requested, and executing it well. That is in opposition with vB's philosophy, which has been to pack it with features and capabilities -- a lot of which doesn't get used and results in very bloated (large) software and an increasingly creaky and fragile platform.

Read up the probably dozen threads here on vb4 migrations, and look at the XF documentation detailing the migration process. That will probably answer 99% of the questions you'd have about a migration. Good luck!
 
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I inherited a site running vBulletin v4. The forum software is falling apart and I desperately need a change. I'm torn between vBulletin 5 and XenForo.

vBulletin 5 seems like it could be an easy upgrade considering the custom theme/template on my website, but I have not heard anything good about it.

XenForo sounds better, but how hard is it to import and customize XenForo to look and feel like my current vB site?
Talk to @Iamtdg about his experience "upgrading" to vb5 from vb4. His isn't even an atypical situation. He's happily a xenforo user now.
 
One reason one of my busiest forums stuck with vB3.7 (not 3.8) is because its performance was terrible under heavy loads, and I had applied so many custom tweaks to the files (enhancing some features, disabling others) that moving up to 3.8 would have been a major task. Not to mention 4.0 or later, since those would have needed a complete rewrite in most cases. I saw comments from other users how much their resource usage increased when they moved to 4.0 that I didn't even consider it.

I think that forum moved to XF 1.x around 2012. (I had moved a couple prior to that in 2011, and had an early license back when XF 1.0 was either in beta, or just after it came out of beta.) It didn't surprise me that when I looked at my resource usage history, XF was loading the server about half as much as vB 3.7 did. (I used to use Cacti to monitor our usage, so I could clearly see trends over time.)

IB's own forums are still running modified versions of 3.8, which says a lot that they can't even trust upgrading their own product. Unfortunately, one of the better forums I need to visit for one of my cars is one of theirs. I hate visiting them, but I can't help it, and I can't find fault with the members or the volunteer staff that runs it. It's not their fault, in other words.
 
I inherited a site running vBulletin v4. The forum software is falling apart and I desperately need a change. I'm torn between vBulletin 5 and XenForo.

vBulletin 5 seems like it could be an easy upgrade considering the custom theme/template on my website, but I have not heard anything good about it.

XenForo sounds better, but how hard is it to import and customize XenForo to look and feel like my current vB site?
Go with Xenforo and get as far away from VB as you can. I made the switch a few months ago to Xenforo, and should have done it a LOT sooner.
 
Great to see that according to the Digital Point cookie tracker, Xenforo has more than twice the market share of vBulletin and Invision has about the same.

View attachment 215900

I'm still rooting for the final demise of vBulletin (y)
Fascinating to see how that has evolved since 2019...

Screenshot 2023-03-05 at 08.15.27.png

also to see how the migration happened:
Screenshot 2023-03-05 at 08.09.53.png


Looking at who's left on vB - under 14% using v5.x - all the rest must be looking to move somewhere - since support for v3.x and 4.x was withdrawn sometime ago...

Screenshot 2023-03-05 at 08.10.47.png

By contrast, look at how the XF installed base are mostly on the current release:

Screenshot 2023-03-05 at 08.10.53.png

Love it:)
 
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all the rest must be looking to move somewhere - since support for v3.x and 4.x was withdrawn sometime ago...
Don't count on it. I'm on a board (extremely NSFW subject matter so won't link) that is on vB 3.8.1.1 and when I have chatted with the owner and mentioned I use Xenforo, he said he's fine with what he has. He knows how to run it and has done a lot of work integrating it with other facets of the site. IIRC, he was also extremely unhappy with 4.x, hence his decision to stay on 3.
 
It's still interesting how many sites are still on vB 3.8 here in 2023. Even the IB forums (IB owning vB) are still on 3.8, although they've hacked it even more to provide modern features (and those hacks looked tacked-on, such as their reactions/likes, or that "endless page" nonsense). When I ditched it for XF, we were on 3.7 since I had so heavily modified it to deal with our large traffic volume that it would have been too difficult to try to reproduce all of that. Seeing how vB4 used so many more resources, we never could upgrade to that. XF came along at the right time for us. It still amazes me today how many sites I visited in the past have slowly made their way to XF, or find new sites that XF is running on.
 
I have one xenforo forum running and a vBulletin forum running.
vB 5 runs with what php level you have running today. just like xenforo.
if i tried to run vB 4.2.5 it would muck up your php current version as it won't run on the current version.
 
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