Hello everyone,
Phase 1 of our forum migration has been completed, and after about two months of testing and a large amount of general feed back we decided that it is time to move into phase 2 of this migration, which will be the official transfer of the forum database from here to Xenforo.
With that said, we are planning to start Phase 2 on December 24th, with an estimated completion date of December 26th. Why three days? Well mostly to buy us some time to solve any data migration issues, do some last minute checking after the data has installed and to allow for anything unforeseen that may come up. So starting on December 25th at 9am this forum will go into read-only mode, with all the content being available for reference, but no one will be able to post anything new.
In a nutshell this process is basically exporting the database from vBulletin, wiping the database in Xenforo and then importing the vBulletin database into XenForo, and there are basically two possible outcomes to this process
:
We are reasonably confident that outcome 1 is the most likely outcome, but to be sure we plan on a few more test export/import operations between now and the 24th, both for practice and to hopefully shake out any issues with the process. The better this goes, the easier the final transfer will be. Definitely keep an eye on this thread and the announcements forum at the Xenforo forum the outcome of this process.
Once we have the data migrated, and we are happy with the results, we plan to leave this forum up in read only mode, probably for the foreseeable future. We feel that it will remain a solid reference and will allow for less broken links in the new forums. And then we can move onto Phase 3.
What is phase 3? Well that will the part where we start to customize the forums for our needs, and we will heavily rely on feedback from the community to customize, tweak and fix issues with the new forums. None of the admin team are Xenforo experts, and most of us have full time jobs, so this process will probably be quite slow going, but what we cannot promise you in timeline or speed we can hopefully make up for with a completely open and honest dialogue around customization, tweaking and repairing of the forums.
That's all I have for you know, if you have any questions let me know in this thread, I'll do my best to answer them as they come up.
Phase 1 of our forum migration has been completed, and after about two months of testing and a large amount of general feed back we decided that it is time to move into phase 2 of this migration, which will be the official transfer of the forum database from here to Xenforo.
With that said, we are planning to start Phase 2 on December 24th, with an estimated completion date of December 26th. Why three days? Well mostly to buy us some time to solve any data migration issues, do some last minute checking after the data has installed and to allow for anything unforeseen that may come up. So starting on December 25th at 9am this forum will go into read-only mode, with all the content being available for reference, but no one will be able to post anything new.
In a nutshell this process is basically exporting the database from vBulletin, wiping the database in Xenforo and then importing the vBulletin database into XenForo, and there are basically two possible outcomes to this process
:
Outcome 1 - The data import is successful and the new forums are open for business. If this happens we will announce it at the new forums, and will add a comment in this thread saying as much.
Outcome 2 - We run into some sort of show stopper and are not able to complete the migration by the evening of the 26th (EST). In this case we will remove the read-only restriction here and make an announcement in this thread explaining this and then we will go back to the drawing board to work out what happened and how to solve the issues and setup another set of days to try again.
Outcome 2 - We run into some sort of show stopper and are not able to complete the migration by the evening of the 26th (EST). In this case we will remove the read-only restriction here and make an announcement in this thread explaining this and then we will go back to the drawing board to work out what happened and how to solve the issues and setup another set of days to try again.
We are reasonably confident that outcome 1 is the most likely outcome, but to be sure we plan on a few more test export/import operations between now and the 24th, both for practice and to hopefully shake out any issues with the process. The better this goes, the easier the final transfer will be. Definitely keep an eye on this thread and the announcements forum at the Xenforo forum the outcome of this process.
Once we have the data migrated, and we are happy with the results, we plan to leave this forum up in read only mode, probably for the foreseeable future. We feel that it will remain a solid reference and will allow for less broken links in the new forums. And then we can move onto Phase 3.
What is phase 3? Well that will the part where we start to customize the forums for our needs, and we will heavily rely on feedback from the community to customize, tweak and fix issues with the new forums. None of the admin team are Xenforo experts, and most of us have full time jobs, so this process will probably be quite slow going, but what we cannot promise you in timeline or speed we can hopefully make up for with a completely open and honest dialogue around customization, tweaking and repairing of the forums.
That's all I have for you know, if you have any questions let me know in this thread, I'll do my best to answer them as they come up.