Thread: Xenforo Conversion Announcement - Part II

Read all of the bullet points carefully, please . Especially the action items one. So a lot of you will happy to know that I've managed to get the importer to properly track and convert private conversations which share a subject. So your separate threads with people will be separate conversations, so long as you used a different subject for them. Conversation splitting won't happen unless you have more than 20 messages exchanged with the person in question, which should keep the total number of conversations somewhat sane. The exact number isn't going to be stable because of the 'interesting' way in which MyBB handles messages. So you may see some conversations broken up anyway. If you have less than 20 pms exchanged with someone, the original subject will get highlighted in the message if it's different from the first. Stuff that may require action on your part . Save your buddy and ignore lists found here . Xenforo has an ignore list but no buddy list. I will be looking at adding a buddy system in the future. For now though you will want to safe the lists and hang onto them. Clear out your drafts . Especially for private conversations. Converting these properly is tricky and it's best just to not have any. Send PMs to yourself as needed instead. Accounts sharing an e-mail will be merged to the lowest user ID . Either setup a different e-mail for your alts, use subaccount tricks, or let them get merged. If you have not joined us on Discord you may want to do so . Staff won't be able to verify your postcount while we are upgrading. Linked avatars don't convert well - partly MyBB's fault. I highly suggest, if you linked your avatar rather than uploaded it, to download and upload your avatar instead before the conversion. Photobucket. Photobucket everywhere. It's pretty jarring after the conversion. If you see a post with the Photobucket curse, please report the post you see it in so we can excise Photobucket from that post andor their profile. I will be blanking all Photobucket signatures and avatars before the conversion . If you have an avatar or signature that uses a Photobucket image, change it or lose your signature. As I mentioned in the previous thread, your personal notepad at the bottom of your control panel will not get converted. Please save this. By sending it in a PM to yourself, for example. You can't start a conversation with yourself in Xenforo. Personally I find this ability to be rather handy, so if you want to be able to talk to yourself before I find a way to mod that nonsense, send a PM to yourself now while you still can. Make sure your can remember your password and that your e-mail works so you can recover your account if needed. In case something happens. 99 of you will just log in with your password as normal. Conversion Issues and Other Notes . The way I've hacked the converter to do this means that there is a chance a few people's PMs with someone will get converted twice. Easier to just tell you to delete the excess than fix the rest of the code. The sheer quantity of PMs means the PM conversion is going to take several days. It looks like it will be possible to engage in conversations in the mean time, but if you've got a high user ID with a high user ID partner, you won't see your conversations with them for awhile. I might lock private conversations for the duration to minimize confusion and 'why are my PMs gone!?' complaints. Xenforo doesn't really handle immense amounts of conversations - as many of us have - all that well. Addressing this will have to wait until after we've upgraded to 2.0 after the conversion. Xenforo doesn't support all of MyBB's BBCode. This will not be immediately addressed as the next step after conversion is finalized will be to upgrade to Xenforo 2. Some things will take a bit longer than others. So expect things to be ugly for a bit. Some BBCode just isn't going to work. The main culprit here is manually specifying dimensions. There are a few others horizontal rules that I'll need to make addons for. The default theme is blinding, and there are tweaks here that we take for granted. I will probably put us on some temp theme in the mean time, but don't expect things to be pretty right from the start. As mentioned, usergroups will be getting pared down before the conversion. They will return as appropriate. URLs will be busted for a short bit until I bring in the redirect scripts. When will the conversion take place? It depends a bit on how many need-to-fix bugs remain in the converter, and if there are any decent optimizations I can still do. After we are confident the conversion works smoothly, we will announce the conversion one week in advance. Currently I'm on trial 40 or so. Next stress point is going to take place Thursday May 10th. If that goes well I may make the announcement Sunday. How long will the site be down? 2-3 hours. Everything else converts very quickly, and the site can function while PMs are getting imported. Why Xenforo? 1 MyBB is completely untenable for what most of you are using the site for. I have been stripping features for years, accordingly. The PM system is only the worst offender here. The heavy weight of integration that brought down the shoutbox, for example. 2 Creating an appropriate converter for Elkarte would likewise take a great deal of time, and I think a big part of Blue Moon's relative strength is that it remains distinct from Elliquiy. I don't want to be running clones. 3 By going with an actively maintained piece of commercial software, I can make sure Blue Moon maintains a healthy number of features while remaining distinct from Elliquiy. 4 Xenforo has private conversations rather than PMs, which means after the conversion you will no longer have to rely on those quote towers so many of you love. More importantly, this is a properly normalized structure that is far more suitable to the sort of usage most members put this site to. 5 Like Elkarte, Xenforo has e-mail management built in, which takes an incredible load off of staff. There is no serious free alternative to this outside of Elkarte.