Future of RS forum - please read

[bh4rnnr]

omg rewinding and fast forwarding to find the start of the song when a cd would do it automatically . It's not like i'm on my boombox waiting for a song to play on the radio so i can record it. I can DL on my phone. I'll give you all my tapes Dave, high qualty maxell and Sony

You still have the mix CD i gave you?

To second Martin's post, will we loose content if we switch over. Lots of resources on here that would be nice to save.

 

[Hulk]

To second Martin's post, will we lose content if we switch over. Lots of resources on here that would be nice to save.

We will not lose any content.

 

[Rzeppa]

We will not lose any content.

We basically lost everything when we switched over in 2005. That sucked big time.

 

[DaveInDenver]

We will not lose any content.

I think I speak for everyone in hoping that the end is in fact near and all is lost!

Honestly, no one wants this. Eventually the software will be obsolete and the content sitting on a dead end platform, though. So making a change when support and scripts exist to port the content over might be wise.

Forums are switching and old posts aren't lost. It's not an insurmountable problem. But the whole "forum2" does show that's it not a trivial question.

 

[Carlos]

I was at TAZ, just browsing... I was curious about the site and I saw this post...

I'll reiterate, I hate Mud (the site) ever since Woody changed up the software. It is slower than dogmeat and I just don't have time for that crap. I can put up with (or block) ads, but the latency is beyond annoying. I don't mind cutting my images down for RS's vB...seriously...if you can't bother to do that then you are just damn lazy.

This is down to the owner. What it sounds like from my perspective, is that MUD has a ****ty server. xenForo cuts down on a lot of the queries that is needed to be communicated back and forth between YOU and the server. vB3 is awesome, but it's outdated. The standards that were in vBulletin has been broken by new companies such as xenForo (who happens to be the same developers who designed the vB3 series).

vB3 is nice and all, but is still heavy on the server no matter what you do with it. If you put it on a cloud platform, the queries that's needed to be communicated back and forth is still heavy. xenForo is supposed to be light. Especially when you upgrade the software that runs the server. PHP, MySQL, GMP, etc.

Right now, the minimum requirements for running vB3.7.x are as follows: PHP 4.3.3 and MySQL 4.0.16

Minimum requirements that is needed to run vB3.8.11 are as follows: PHP5.5.0 and MySQL 5.5.8

However, 3.8.11 adds compatibility with PHP7, but nothing else. With xenForo 2.1 it doesn't just add compatibilty with PHP7, it adds a feature that requires it. Push Notifications was revealed recently and its the feature that they've been teasing since the idea that PHP7 will be supported by the team.

When I view this site, the pageloads are snappy. That's because the owner and administrators were on the job, trying to upkeep it. So, I wouldn't be worried about the transition from this vB3, to xenForo whatever. If I were them, I'd migrate to xF1 first to cornfirm everything is correct, and everything is ready to go. Then upgrade to XF2 and make the final touches to the new site. Once that's done, upgrade every part of the site, including going https.

Also, most of the concerns users have with migrating to xenForo will be oliberated. Most of the features users wanted are already in xF2 right out of the box.

That being said: Good luck to all.

EDIT: I forgot how barebones the edit system is. Jesus.

 

[wesintl]

We basically lost everything when we switched over in 2005. That sucked big time.

That was because the forum was a freeware version(MS Access?) that got HACKED. It was nothing to do with upgrading from one forum to another.

probably should have had some backups running and we could have failed to a backup but i digress...

I'm sure somone could have spent a gazillion hours to clean it up but it was a year or less worth of data. There is a copy of the db on the server somewhere. Matt can probably send it to you and you can clean it up... and we could probably import the data

 

[wesintl]

When I view this site, the pageloads are snappy. That's because the owner and administrators were on the job, trying to upkeep it. So, I wouldn't be worried about the transition from this vB3, to xenForo whatever. If I were them, I'd migrate to xF1 first to cornfirm everything is correct, and everything is ready to go. Then upgrade to XF2 and make the final touches to the new site. Once that's done, upgrade every part of the site, including going https.
EDIT: I forgot how barebones the edit system is. Jesus.

 

[nuclearlemon]

actually read this thread although i've avoided it because i'm not technological. i miss xp dearly and have only fired up my pc with 7 a couple of times....i mainly use my work laptop which our it guy dumbed down for me.

i do realize that we have to move on with the world, however. if there's a chance at all of our system not working in the future, now is the time to change rather then when it's crunch time.

my only experience has been learning cafe express for the state association, so i can't say boo about any websites, but if the computer saavy folks think it's a good option, i will trust their judgment as they know better than me and will be the ones to deal with it

 

[Romer]

those who get the ads on Mud are not silver star members. Thats a switch woody throws when you contribute. The webmaster could just as easily throw that switch for everyone or just keep it to members.

He did have some issues for those non silver star members it took him a while to work through, but again if you throw the switch to limit or block the ads for members those shouldnt popup

Mud didn't lose any content that I could tell as my post and pictures from 2003 are still there.

He shut the website down overnight and part of the next day when converting

I have always just used Chrome on my iphone to read the forums.

 

[kurtnkegger]

I’m a silver star guy on mud, but don’t stay logged in. It takes a bit for initial ads to load before you can start to sign in. That’s frustrating.


I like to read posts here without being forced to log in, and appreciate the fact that I’m not forced to pay for ad free content on this forum.

I don’t care for “likes” or that type of social media nonsense. Those are the things I don’t like about the “new” mud format. I agree with posts on pictures, and being able to load them with an auto sizing function.

In short, I like this forum because the club isn’t driven by outside advertising and cookie hijacking, I can read posts with out being forced to log in (most of my visits here are as a “guest”), and this forum feels like it’s built for adults who don’t care about the social media ad-ons and fluff.

 

[Rzeppa]

That was because the forum was a freeware version(MS Access?) that got HACKED. It was nothing to do with upgrading from one forum to another.

It was an issue with migrating the db from easycgi to our new server. Kipper even offered to come out there and cut their grass LOL! Bottom line is easycgi is a crappy host and I pulled my personal hosting as well as my business hosting away from them because they suck.

 

[Hulk]

I was at TAZ, just browsing... I was curious about the site and I saw this post...

This is down to the owner. What it sounds like from my perspective, is that MUD has a ****ty server. xenForo cuts down on a lot of the queries that is needed to be communicated back and forth between YOU and the server. vB3 is awesome, but it's outdated. The standards that were in vBulletin has been broken by new companies such as xenForo (who happens to be the same developers who designed the vB3 series).

vB3 is nice and all, but is still heavy on the server no matter what you do with it. If you put it on a cloud platform, the queries that's needed to be communicated back and forth is still heavy. xenForo is supposed to be light. Especially when you upgrade the software that runs the server. PHP, MySQL, GMP, etc.

Right now, the minimum requirements for running vB3.7.x are as follows: PHP 4.3.3 and MySQL 4.0.16

Minimum requirements that is needed to run vB3.8.11 are as follows: PHP5.5.0 and MySQL 5.5.8

However, 3.8.11 adds compatibility with PHP7, but nothing else. With xenForo 2.1 it doesn't just add compatibilty with PHP7, it adds a feature that requires it. Push Notifications was revealed recently and its the feature that they've been teasing since the idea that PHP7 will be supported by the team.

When I view this site, the pageloads are snappy. That's because the owner and administrators were on the job, trying to upkeep it. So, I wouldn't be worried about the transition from this vB3, to xenForo whatever. If I were them, I'd migrate to xF1 first to cornfirm everything is correct, and everything is ready to go. Then upgrade to XF2 and make the final touches to the new site. Once that's done, upgrade every part of the site, including going https.

Also, most of the concerns users have with migrating to xenForo will be oliberated. Most of the features users wanted are already in xF2 right out of the box.

That being said: Good luck to all.

EDIT: I forgot how barebones the edit system is. Jesus.

Hiya Carlos, I'm the RisingSun over at TAZ. Thanks for making your way over here to check out our forum.

Concerning Mud, but they use 6TB of bandwidth a month. I was just discussing this with Woody who is the owner. We're so much smaller that it's silly to compare, but many of our users are familiar with those forums so it's a natural thing to do.

Thanks for checking us out. We upgraded to 3.8.11 about 7 months ago. Before that, we'd been on 3.7.x for, like, ever.

The XF solution seems to be the way we're leaning.

 

[Hulk]

It was an issue with migrating the db from easycgi to our new server. Kipper even offered to come out there and cut their grass LOL! Bottom line is easycgi is a crappy host and I pulled my personal hosting as well as my business hosting away from them because they suck.

It's all a little fuzzy, but here's what I remember. The old freebie forum software got hacked... TWICE. The second time, Kipper didn't want to fix it again and suggested we either bite the bullet and pay for vBulletin or take advantage of ih8mud's free club forums. We voted overwhelmingly to pay to keep our own forum.

vBulletin runs on a standard LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) rather than an IIS server like we had with the original forum (Kipper is a MS guy). I think we made the move to HostGator to accommodate this but we may have done it later. I do know when we made the move I converted all the .asp pages for the website (non-forum) to .shtml pages.

Dang, that was a long time ago.

The old database from the original forum (RisingSun.mdb) and the old software is archived on Hostgator. It would need to be moved to an Microsoft hosting solution to try to stand it up again, remove the malicious code, and extract whatever old posts are in there. You might be able to do it over on the CM website since that is a much newer version of Microsoft hosting. I'm dubious it would be a good use of your time, but we still have the data.

The current forum (/forum2) has been online since 8/2005. The first thread that's worth looking at was an Argentine Pass cleanup run. Pretty cool how many of us are still part of the club!

The point here is that 2018 is a much different situation than 2005. Our original forum was running on a weird free forum app, and it had been online for maybe a year. When we got hacked, we lost several months of the most recent posts and Kipper made the decision that it wasn't worth trying to recover the old stuff. We just started fresh with vBulletin. I do recall there were a few tech threads we lost that we regretted, but we shed a tear and moved on. Even if the original forum had never been hacked, it would have been an unusual migration effort, since the original forum was running on such oddball software.

Our situation now is very different. First, we're addressing a potential migration before any unfortunate incident occurs. Second, we're on a platform that runs about 30% of all forums (and used to run many more back in its heyday). Migrations from vBulletin to xenforo are common now. When Woody moved ih8mud, he was an early adopter. Now it's no big deal. Finally, we now have 13 years of content we'd like to keep.

If we migrate -- which seems likely -- we will do everything we can to maintain all content. Even Backwoodsgoop.

 

[Hulk]

EDIT: I forgot how barebones the edit system is. Jesus.

This is the reason would should go ahead and upgrade now.

 

[AimCOTaco]

Matt,
Thanks for spearheading this and thanks everyone for the background and historic info.
This upgrade is a big, important, and high stakes job IMO!

Now I'm wondering:
Who's the "team" going to consist of? Are we thinking of the core Hulk-Wes-Kipper-Lars crew or are more heads needed? What are the upfront and recurring costs looking like?
...but I guess a lot of that detail should probably go in the members area anyway.

Thanks again guys, exciting times around here,

 

[wesintl]

It was an issue with migrating the db from easycgi to our new server. Kipper even offered to come out there and cut their grass LOL! Bottom line is easycgi is a crappy host and I pulled my personal hosting as well as my business hosting away from them because they suck.

I guess your mixing when we got hacked and upgrading forum software vs migrating hosts. Sure maybe it was a pita to move from one host to another and it was a learning experience but we didn't lose any data. They just had a slow way to pipe our DB to a new server. Couple that with we didn't want to pay for another year on that host while we were on a new host so we were tying to get it done by end of month.


What carlos is saying is it's a super simple interface that 3.x is, editing shows that. If 3.x was supported further and autosized pics i'd be happy. I agree with mysiteguy from a security standpoint we need to be on mostly up to date software.

 

[Hulk]

Here's a quote from MrSiteGuy on The Admin Zone (TAZ) for doing our migration to xenforo:

I could do the entire thing, XF import including media gallery and import your photopost data. Setup XF's standard redirects for URLs plus add my additional custom redirects for those they do not cover, add my photophost redirects (no plugin for that, its all in .htaccess), etc. You won't lose content this way or any link rank from Google.

If you do the install first of XF in another folder on your site, for instance, http://risingsun4x4club.org/xf , then add your logo and any theme changes yourself, that would save you some money, and I could do the everything for $100.

If you need me to do the installation and any theme changes, then it would be $150.
Once everything is verified working, including all redirects, then I'd backup VBulletin, remove it from it's directory and move XF there. (A full backup is also made before I start).

All this assumes you're using Apache (or Litespeed). If you're using NGinx, setting up redirects takes more work and it's $25 extra.

Oh, also, users will not have to change passwords, that is handled by XF's import.

VBulletin would need to be put in offline mode during the import so posts/threads/etc stay consistent and people don't say "hey where did my post I made 2 hours ago on VB go!?!". That's for about 30-60 minutes depending on server speed, and how many attachments users have.

I would need CPanel or ssh access.

If you choose ssh, I'll also need mysql's root user password, so I can setup the database and database user permissions. For Cpanel, I won't need additional access.

Best time to do this is on the morning of your slowest day of the week. Most of my work for my big ongoing clients is on my own schedule, so any weekday ought to be fine. Weekends are a possibility, except tomorrow and Sunday as I've already made commitments.

You wouldn't pay me up front, not until it's live and you're satisfied its working correctly.

If we want him to do everything, it's $250 at most.

The only thing I would want to do myself is purchase the license for xenforo so it's in our name. I need to look into pricing so we can get a full picture of what this will cost us on an ongoing basis.

 

[lars]

I move that the Rising Sun 4x4 Club Spends $250 for the migraton of the Forum plus themoney for the license.

Here's a quote from MrSiteGuy on The Admin Zone (TAZ) for doing our migration to xenforo:



If we want him to do everything, it's $250 at most.

The only thing I would want to do myself is purchase the license for xenforo so it's in our name. I need to look into pricing so we can get a full picture of what this will cost us on an ongoing basis.

 

[kurtnkegger]

I will second that motion. Considering we approve similar sums for pizza that only lasts a day. The whole club benefits.

 

[lars]

Since the spending of Club money can only be done by Club members, please see the poll in the members only section.