Migrating to Xenforo

Duff-Man says...one of the music forums I post on a lot (fairly high traffic though maybe not as high as MacRumors) made the transition last year and the downtime and post-migration hiccups were pretty minimal - I suspect and hope that everything here will do so as well and people will generally be very happy with the new software....oh yeah!

 

I am IcEWoLF from Theadminzone and XenForo saw you thread and your post there. I am glad you are switching to XenForo, been using XF over the past two years and our site traffic and activity sky rocketed, the XF notification system is so much nicer than vBulletin!

I am looking forward to see the gallery option on these boards, so people can start posting their sexy iPhone/iPad pics.

 

The Unity forums went from VBulletin to XenForo a while ago, and yes it's nicer. Among other things, better notification system, and better moderation/spam controls.

--Eric

 

Perhaps a couple of reminders on the home page to all would be in order as the time draws closer.

As someone who has worked on projects like this in the past (ranging from BBS type software to large corp infrastructure software) I hope it all goes smoothly for MR.

 

Sounds good. As a dev I love beta testing. Makes the software better for everyone in the end

 

As a new member to the forum have enjoyed it with all the great information available, look forward to the new changes!

 

I'm familiar with Zenforo, it's a terrific product and results in an excellent forum once the migration is complete. The only challenge is for those with no patience.

For a forum this size it's rather laborious, yet the good news is migration is just a one time task.

 

Fantastic news.

I do think it's sad that vBulletin has gone the way it has - I remember back in the day that it was considered the best software around by a long way.

I do know of quite a few people who have even migrated from IPB to XenForo - it's got a very good reputation actually.

The other forum software that I've found interesting is Discourse, though, fantastic as it is, I'm not sure it's something I'd want to use in production just yet, though I do frequent a few forums running it still.

 

A few questions

Thanks …

Link integrity

Will external links to topics, and to posts, remain good?

I assume that there'll be redirection to the new URL for each item.

Spaces

Do you know whether the new approach will allow nonbreaking*spaces?

vBulletin misrepresents them as * …

 

XenForo converts non-breaking spaces to regular spaces.

--Eric

 

Nonbreaking spaces?

OK. That's better than *

Tidiness and legibility. It's a habit that's hard to break … I automatically, primarily, aim for optimal use of nonbreaking spaces. Then wherever I know that the environment might not support them, I preview, then edit out the *

 

Oh dear, a new platform syntax to learn.
Still, it's got to be less clunky than the dinosaur vBulletin's become.
I hope there's at least some decent autoconversion tools so old posts don't get all slashy-square-brackety and plaintexted. No doubt smilies will be converted in scandalous fashion, to the outrage of many.

Good luck!

 

Xenforo does an exceptional job at converting vBulletin forums. I believe most of the posting user codes are the same as far as using img tags and other things. The hardest part will be getting used to the new layout.

 

The current forums have surely done a good job serving the community, so here's to hoping that Xenforo can do the same.

Thanks, Arn.

 

Ah …

OK so I just realised who you are. Hey, thanks. Nice site, nice moderators. Big thanks.

 

I look forward to the new setup. Please let us know when you have the test sandbox ready for us to play with!

 

MacRumors Forums search engine upgrade (2014-12-09)

Was yesterday's downtime, for the search engine upgrade, part of preparations for the migration to Xenforo?

If so, should we watch for anything unusual about search results?

Thanks

 

Will all members be transferred, even the banned ones with zero posts, the ones normally banned for spamming?
If you do that, it will probably lessen your member numbers though.

And the new interface, will it have only one theme or several to choose from?

 

This is a good opportunity to clean out the deadwood -- so-called "members" who have not even looked in on this site for a given period of time, much less posted. There are undoubtedly people here who joined and who have continued to lurk but who don't post or haven't posted, but if they've been around for a while and still check in on the site regularly and recently, their memberships shouldn't be purged, of course, but, yes, those which are clearly spammers and/or spambots who "joined" a long time ago and who never posted and/or who were promptly swatted and banned should be eradicated forever now..... The real benefit to doing this is that it potentially speeds things up for the real users of the forum.

 

At what length of time would you guess that a dormant member should be treated as deadwood?