Comments for Tech Llama

Comment on Converting a “Big Board”: vBulletin to xenForo Migration by Hoffi

Hoffi — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:55:48 +0000

Sounds good.

We also plan a migration. Test works good for now, but we will wait for 1.1.

Comment on Converting a “Big Board”: vBulletin to xenForo Migration by Tony

Tony — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 22:17:06 +0000

Interesting stuff.

I have 3 – 4 boards to convert to XenForo, but can’t until they get some basics implemented. Mostly a warning system. Once we’re there, I’ll be saying goodybe to vB.

vB was good, but I never even ugpraded to v4 – it was just such a shocking update with on real value. And they’re so behind the curve on the more ‘social’ side that forums clearly need. Like something as simple as a like button.

Comment on Converting a “Big Board”: vBulletin to xenForo Migration by lazyllama

lazyllama — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:37:19 +0000

It was ragtek’s Framework (needed for most of his add-ons) which was the problem. It carried on doing the same even when disabled, which was a surprise. Only uninstalling and removing the files made it better.

He’s looking at fixing the issue ( http://xenforo.com/community/threads/backward-compatability-breaks.13290/page-2 ) already.

Comment on Converting a “Big Board”: vBulletin to xenForo Migration by Mike

Mike — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:29:01 +0000

What xenForo plug-in did you install that caused slow query issues?

Comment on Converting a “Big Board”: vBulletin to xenForo Migration by lazyllama

lazyllama — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:54:37 +0000

We keep the phpBB separate so users have to re-register. Keeps things simple, and we opened them a while before so people could sort out their accounts. We had a couple of admins around to authorise accounts.

Sphinx was initially very complex under vBulletin as the official “beta” mod was useless.
I ended up using DigitalPoint’s version which was better.

Under xenForo it was much simpler, though that may be because I’d dealt with it before. I still haven’t got the metadata search working, but the search results come back so quickly now that I’ll live without that for a while.

Comment on Converting a “Big Board”: vBulletin to xenForo Migration by lazyllama

lazyllama — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:48:23 +0000

There are a few:
Search within a thread – we have some very large threads
Summary of who posted on a thread – again useful for large threads
Ignore User – coming in v1.1 though

There are probably some more that haven’t sprung immediately to mind, and there were a lot of functions in vB4 that we didn’t use (albums, social groups). I think xenForo more than makes up for it in slickness, performance and general design.

Comment on Converting a “Big Board”: vBulletin to xenForo Migration by Niall

Niall — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:29:24 +0000

…also, are you able to go into more details about the ‘useful functions missing’ from XenForo compared to vBulletin? Are they mostly admin/moderator related features or ones that users are missing?

Comment on Converting a “Big Board”: vBulletin to xenForo Migration by Niall

Niall — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:26:30 +0000

Thanks for the post, very interesting to read your experiences of migrating a large vBulletin installation to XenForo. My site is of a similar size to yours, although with a larger user base I believe (1500+ online on average, spiking to 4000+ on busy days) so it’s good to see a successful migration as I’m strongly considering moving to XenForo at some point.

Nice idea to setup a temporary phpBB forum during the migration. Did you import user accounts to it so people could login with their existing credentials or just ask your users to re-register?

How did you find configuring Sphinx for XenForo? Any gotchas or is it straight forward? I’m still using the built in vBulletin search, as well as Google search, but definitely considering switching to Sphinx.

Thanks!

Comment on Passing info from PowerCLI into your VM using guestinfo variables by lazyllama

lazyllama — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 16:20:29 +0000

VMwareService.exe in Windows has been replaced by vmtoolsd.exe and seems to take the same parameters.

Comment on vSphere 4.1 ESXi Installable on USB? by lazyllama

lazyllama — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:26:10 +0000

What HP ship will be the ‘Embedded’ version though, which is supported on USB.

If you went to VMworld (or are going to the one in Copenhagen) there’s an excellent session on “ESXi Internals” which reveals a lot about how the ESXi file system is built up at boot time etc.