Forum Software Upgrade from phpBB to vBulletin

[Colin Sampaleanu]

Thanks Omar. Unfortunately it lists your posts and not your threads, so multiple posts to the one thread appear - but it's still useable. It'd also be nice to see who the last poster was. Other functionality appears to be good though.

If you click on somebody's name, there is actually a link to find all posts by that user, as well as another link to find all threads...

Regards,

[Colin Sampaleanu]

Does vBulletin supports thread posting through emails (like mailing list) - like Jive?

Nothing built-in. We actually were hoping to move to Jive, but couldn't get any sort of clean conversion of the old posts.

That said, I hope that we'll have news (NNTP) integration via a plugin in about 1-2 months. There is a plugin for vBulletin 3 that people use for this purpose. We're running vBulletin 3.5, which is the current version as of about a month ago, and the plugin is in alpha version for that, but the author has announced that now that vB 3.5 is out in final form he'll be taking the plugin to gold level.

Regards,

[Colin Sampaleanu]

the Gentoo Linux forum site uses phpBB and doesn't seem to suffer too many performance issues. They have appx. 100,000 registered users and 3m posts.
http://forums.gentoo.org/

Regards,

Darren,

We definitely had some serious performance issues. It's hard for me to say how much of this was due to phpBB and how much was due to sheer load on the system, but things are definitely better now with vBulletin.

Above and beyond that though, management was a nightmare. Just the tip of the iceberg is that at least every day or two, somebody would register, but their confirmation email would not make it to them. There was simply no way for these people to get the system to send them another confirmation email. This would usually result in an email to me, but I would actually have no way to look up their account half the time since it didn't support a search by email, just by exact username or exact fragment thereof. There were any number of other issues, including the pain of handling changes to templates (especially in the face of updates to the system), the absolute nightmare in terms of actually installing and managing multiple plugins (especially in the face of updates to the base system), and the fairly frequent security issues patches that required us to spend time upgrading the system.

On top of that, phpBB seems to be effectively dead. phpBB 2.0 was released in April of 2002. Version 3 (or 2.2 or whatever it has been called at various points), with a number of needed enhancements, has been promised as effectively "real soon now but we don't know when" for the better part of the time since that release, yet appears to be still a long ways off. The phpBB team just had a core person decide to leave. In their own words, "Paul S. Owen (better known as psoTFX to most of you), who put in a lot of blood, sweat and tears as the Lead Developer for phpBB2.0.x, phpBB3.0.x (née Olympus) and more recently becoming the co-manager of the phpBB Project, has indefinitely left the team due to unforeseen personal reasons."

While the feature set of vBulletin is not as rich as Jive Forums (which would have been my first choice), it's still quite a bit better than phpBB, and we did manage to keep post data intact (links to old posts notwithstanding), which was the primary criteria in making any decision. It would actually be possible to fix up even old (internal) links, to the extent that we have the old site around and somebody could manually edit posts and fix them up, but it'd be somewhat prohibitive in terms of time effort. Maybe a summer intern :-)

Any look and feel concerns (i.e. default blue, 'not very spring-like' template) should be revisited in a month or two, once we've had a chance to get somebody to do some template work. The performance and management issues made waiting for the final look and feel not a very attractive choice.

So I don't regret making this move at this time at all...

Regards,

[Colin Sampaleanu]

.. or a way to set your locale?? (they seem to have accounted for timezone and DST but I can't change the date format to something slightly less dopey than mm-dd-yy. GRRRR)

I can set a specific date format (and even a locale) for the entire board, but I don't think it can be set on a user by user basis.

Possibly what would be appropriate is to set it to yyyy-mm-dd. That leaves no ambiguity, and is easy to read, if not the native format for either the US, Canada, or Europe...

Regards,

[davison]

Hi Colin,

I should have quoted to make it clear, but I was replying to the post directly above mine which seemed to suggest a possible schema issue as a performance problem in phpBB. Certainly wasn't suggesting we didn't *have* any performance issues.

For all we know, the Gentoo site sits on a large farm of quad-opteron's or something

D.

[Andreas Senft]

Possibly what would be appropriate is to set it to yyyy-mm-dd.

I think that would be a good choice.

Just my 2 cents,
Andreas

[Costin Leau]

That said, I hope that we'll have news (NNTP) integration via a plugin in about 1-2 months. There is a plugin for vBulletin 3 that people use for this purpose. We're running vBulletin 3.5, which is the current version as of about a month ago, and the plugin is in alpha version for that, but the author has announced that now that vB 3.5 is out in final form he'll be taking the plugin to gold level.

Nice! I'll look forward to having such a feature inside the forums.

[davison]

I think that would be a good choice.

Just my 2 cents,
Andreas

+1

Regards,

[Thomas Matzner]

Maybe a summer intern :-)

Hi Colin, your location appears to be on the Northern hemisphere, which means your next summer is about 8 months away (just as mine). Could you please make it a winter intern instead?

Joking aside: Those links are important. Many questions put in this forum concern similar basic gaps in users' knowledge, or misunderstandings. The rule for anyone having a question is therefore to do a thorough search of possible answers before putting the question for the 14th time. This saves both time for people having lots of questions (like myself) and those having the experience to answer them (like yourself).

Those missing links cut users off from possible answers to their questions. As a result, questions the answers of which are already present might be posed again.

By the way, links into the forum from the outside are also broken, of course. That's a problem because Google allows search expressions that this forum software doesn't. The other day, when inquiring about one of those lengthy Exception names, the forum software complained that the search term was too long to be searched for. Now, I can't shorten the name of that Exception single-handedly, can I? (I'd like to shorten it to length = 0, but...) Therefore, when getting an error code or message, there is a point for searching via Google vs. this forum's search function.

The last point might be healed if Google could be talked into revisiting the entire forum, thereby replacing its old links by the current ones.

[Colin Sampaleanu]

... Therefore, when getting an error code or message, there is a point for searching via Google vs. this forum's search function.

The last point might be healed if Google could be talked into revisiting the entire forum, thereby replacing its old links by the current ones.

Google _will_ end up re-indexing the same content in the new format. It will just take time, probably the better part of a month or two...

Regards,