We have a brand new Forum Platform!

[eugenio]

Dear users,
after exactly 20 years - check my very first post, dated Jan 31st 2002 - our old forum platform is ready to retire.

We have a new, modern, forum, based on the amazing Xenforo platform and I have migrated all the ~20k posts and users to it.

The forum has everything you expect from a modern platform:
- personalized notifications (alert / email)
- you can mention another user
- you can watch a forum you want to follow
- reactions on posts
- avatars
- gamification (users badges, points, ... )
- media embedding
- looks great on mobile

and much more.

We also have a new suggestions forum that replaces Canny for submitting and upvoting suggestions and ideas you would like to see implemented.

Let me know here in this thread your feedback, comments, problems you might have encountered. Thanks!

Eugenio

 

[deep64blue]

20 years is a good run for a piece of software

Logged on fine this morning and delighted to see feature improvements back in the forum rather than yet another platform.

How much of the migration was automated by xenforo and how much did you have to write / do yourself?

 

[eugenio]

Choosing which platform to adopt wasn't easy but when I tried xenforo I was impressed by how deeply customizable it was and I bought a license right away.

The migration was easier than expected, xenforo has some official importers that allow to migrate from the most popular forum platforms (phpBB, vBulletin, etc.) .

Our old platform, phorum, was not included, but I found an old phorum-to-phpBB migration script (which I had to modify because it didn't work with the latest phpBB version) so I first converted the forum to phpBB and then to xenForo.
There have been a few things that didn't work as expected (probably because the first migration was not perfect) but the guys at xenForo were very collaborative and gave me all the info I needed to fix them!

The most tedious part was the migration of the canny suggestions, being a cloud service I didn't have direct access to the DB, but finally I managed to import almost everything in the new suggestions forum (except comments).

 

[miktham]

This is so easy on searching and newbies like myself

I am so proud of getting invole on this app

 

[deep64blue]

Our old platform, phorum, was not included, but I found an old phorum-to-phpBB migration script (which I had to modify because it didn't work with the latest phpBB version) so I first converted the forum to phpBB and then to xenForo.

Thanks for the background, really interesting.