Moving to Xenforo

Hoping the group here can help me. We run a fairly large forum in our niche with over 6 million posts and were running VB 4 for years. Recently upgraded to VB5 and the mobile suite, when some issues were showing up and all hell has broken loose.

We have been debating on Xenforo for a while, because of what seems like a helpful group of developers, rather than “submit a trouble ticket and we will help you in a few days”, but here is where I am stuck.

We are not great with this stuff, and will need someone to assist in migration. I know nothing about the migration process and expect to pay for this, but my question is about how does it work? Can the database be transferred and images, etc stay put? Will SEO be lost (we come up a LOT in search for our niche).

How long does a migration take? If I hire someone tomorrow, can it be done and running in an hour or 2? A day? Several days?

I know this sounds rather crazy, but as the creative person behind the site, I’m not as “up to it” as I should be, but trying to learn as much as possible and we want to do this very soon. Finally, are there people on this forum that are for hire or assist in migration? Is there a recommended service?

Any and all help appreciated.

TheTourVan said:

We run a fairly large forum in our niche with over 6 million posts and were running VB 4 for years.
...
How long does a migration take? If I hire someone tomorrow, can it be done and running in an hour or 2? A day? Several days?

Click to expand...

Certainly not in an hour or two.

Its going to depend a great deal on the speed of your server, especially table inserts. Is this forum a vanilla / generic VB setup? Or do you have custom mods installed?

It took me about a week in prep for a far smaller forum, be careful it’s not rushed into.

Dubbed Navigator said:

It took me about a week in prep for a far smaller forum,

Click to expand...

For TAZ it takes already a month for that:

The Sandman said:

You many be noticing some changes on TAZ as we get ready for this major upgrade. We're getting close...

Click to expand...

mysiteguy said:

Its going to depend a great deal on the speed of your server, especially table inserts. Is this forum a vanilla / generic VB setup? Or do you have custom mods installed?

Click to expand...

We use AWS and size and speed should not be an issue.
In VB4 we were pretty heavily modded, but in VB5 I would say it falls somewhere in between. There are a few mods, but there are not too many out there that work for us.

Dubbed Navigator said:

It took me about a week in prep for a far smaller forum, be careful it’s not rushed into.

Click to expand...

Understood. We will have to hire an expert, because that is not us, and know our limitations, and I am sure during that time, they uncover some errors, that need to be fixed as well. Thank you for the info.

doubt said:

For TAZ it takes already a month for that:

Click to expand...

Not sure what you’re trying prove comparing TAZ’s XF1 > XF2.1 upgrade to a vB5 > XF import.

Either way it’s a WIP of course and we all have work/lives outside of TAZ.

6 millions posts can take many hours, the actual migration process (user/post import) is very time-consuming. If you are using a dedicated server, my estimation is 18~40 hours.

I suggest you do a user prune first, remove all old users with 0 posts. Clean up your forums if possible. When I moved my vb4 forum to XF, I deleted 400K game posts.

You don't have to shut down your old forum during the migration, make it read-only. By this way, it will have little impact on your search rankings.

Unless you have to develop custom addons, the migration is quite easy.

I remember migrating a site that had 3M posts take me over 18 hours to migrate, but then had one that has 10M only take 6 hours. It can depend on #'s attachments, lengths of posts, etc. I know some use the CLI importers, which is nice, but I had to use some custom importer for a custom platform that was built.

I would recommend having someone that can ensure your redirects will work for XF. So as far as getting it done the next day or a few hours later...it takes time.
You should also go ahead and book a designer if keeping the style being similar is important to the community.

To backtrack to this one, after a week of custom theme being done, the actual migration was done in about 5 hours. We are now adjusting our settings and will be good to go.

Thanks for all of the help on this forum to help us make this switch.

Up and running and oh so smoothly. Should have made this change years ago.

TheTourVan said:

Up and running and oh so smoothly. Should have made this change years ago.

Click to expand...

Care to share your link to the site?

Bionic Rooster said:

Care to share your link to the site?

Click to expand...

Not sure on rules, but our forum is here.

Congrats on the migration I like the theme and the custom node icons.

Threadloom said:

Congrats on the migration I like the theme and the custom node icons.

Click to expand...

Thank you, the wonderful group here led us to Pixelexit and it has been amazing. Still some things to work on for add ons, that are giving us some fits, but so far, we could not be happier.

TheTourVan said:

Thank you, the wonderful group here led us to Pixelexit and it has been amazing. Still some things to work on for add ons, that are giving us some fits, but so far, we could not be happier.

Click to expand...

Russ does great work for a number of sites. May I ask how long your migration took? Did you go directly to XF2.1?

Threadloom said:

Russ does great work for a number of sites. May I ask how long your migration took? Did you go directly to XF2.1?

Click to expand...

Yes. There was about a week of prep, but the migration itself took almost 5 hours on the nose.

TheTourVan said:

Not sure on rules, but our forum is here.

Click to expand...

Great looking site and yes Pixelexit does do fantastic work with awesome support.