On Friday, July 14th from midnight to 3:00 AM (EST), I will be migrating the lilHonda forums from vBulletin to Xenforo. I expect the outage to last at least an hour, but possibly more. Once the migration is complete, I will reopen the lilHonda forums. In the coming weeks and months, you'll likely notice small changes as we work out the bugs.
Why?
vBulletin is on its last legs and has no future; and has trended this way since the company was sold. The version we are currently on (v4) is many years old and has been End of Lifed (no more updates following 4.2.5). vB5 is not an option and most forum administrators have already opted for the only logical replacement: Xenforo.
Xenforo is in active development, and has a pretty strong community behind it. It's also somewhat similar to vBulletin in behavior/feel. In fact, two of the lead developers used to work for vBulletin before it was sold to Internet Brands.
I'm sure the migration will be traumatic for some, but rest assured, it will be worth it!
New features that were not present in the previous software (vBulletin):
I'm sure some of you will have questions and concerns regarding the upcoming migration, please feel free to submit them in this thread. I'll try to do my best to answer/address them.
Thanks,
Ben Tiedgen
lilHonda Owner
Why?
vBulletin is on its last legs and has no future; and has trended this way since the company was sold. The version we are currently on (v4) is many years old and has been End of Lifed (no more updates following 4.2.5). vB5 is not an option and most forum administrators have already opted for the only logical replacement: Xenforo.
Xenforo is in active development, and has a pretty strong community behind it. It's also somewhat similar to vBulletin in behavior/feel. In fact, two of the lead developers used to work for vBulletin before it was sold to Internet Brands.
I'm sure the migration will be traumatic for some, but rest assured, it will be worth it!
- All existing forums, threads, posts, PMs, profile posts, user galleries, usergroups, users, permissions, and likes/thanks will be imported.
- One large difference will be the location of the forums. The new software will reside at the root (lilhonda.com), no longer lilhonda.com/webboard. However, URL redirection scripts will be in place to redirect users coming from google search results or personal bookmarks; this should cut down on almost all of the 404 errors. After a few weeks of indexing the new location, google will slowly update their search results. However, I do suggest that users update any bookmarked threads and/or posts they may have to reflect the new forum path, because eventually, the old software will be uninstalled and completely removed from the server.
New features that were not present in the previous software (vBulletin):
- Increased security and password hashing
- Facebook / Twitter / Google account linking & integration. If you are a new user, you can sign up by using any of those methods. If you had a profile already, you can now link your social media account to your profile to allow for sharing of content across various platforms.
- New content type called "Resources" - The XenForo Resource Manager is an add-on that allows you to manage resources such as files and tutorials or other article-like content along side your normal forum. The aim is allow content such as files to be listed with a focus on the initial content rather than discussion surrounding it.
- New content type called "Media Gallery" - The XenForo Media Gallery is an add-on that allows you to create galleries of images and videos in your forum, organized into admin-defined categories or user-created albums.
- Users can be alerted by putting the @ symbol in front of their username.
- Threads can be tagged for keywords, and liked.
- New platform agnostic styling & responsive design: vBulletin was/is not mobile friendly at all, xenforo was designed to work with any device from your phone to your tablet to your desktop
- Stability & scalability. You should notice speed & other performance increases.
- Private messages are now "conversations" (essentially private threads replacing your PMs). Messages and replies will be threaded, allowing you to refer to earlier ones easily, eliminating the need for inboxes & sent message folders.
- More video media embedding is now supported. Youtube, Dailymotion, etc.
- If you have previously read a thread, clicking on its title will take you to the first unread post.
- We can now run the latest and greatest PHP 7.1.x (you should notice a significant increase in speed while browsing the forums)
- And much much more.
I'm sure some of you will have questions and concerns regarding the upcoming migration, please feel free to submit them in this thread. I'll try to do my best to answer/address them.
Thanks,
Ben Tiedgen
lilHonda Owner
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