Thread: Xenforo Conversion Announcement

So, this has been a long time coming. Every member should read and understand this - ask questions if you need to - else risk ending up very confused. As many of you are aware, continuing with our current forum software has become completely untenable. As of this posting, we are roughly a month from reaching the twenty million private message mark. The software is only working because of various custom changes I made to the database. 'Working' is a very generous concept, here. Why Xenforo? 1 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. 2 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. 3 Like Elkarte and the planned move for Elliquiy, Xenforo comes with e-mail management now, which will take a significant load off of staff duties. 4 Unlike SMFElkarte, the styling and layout still follows the same sort of 'path' that MyBB does. 5 Everrything else Xenforo does that MyBB can't. Galleries, chat, whathaveyou. 6 All the addons done for Xenforo that just don't happen for MyBB. Or are directly integrated into the core. When Xenforo? Once I have finished fixing the PM-PC import, I will announce when the conversion will occur. There will be at least a one-week warning. After the initial conversion, the forums will remain open while the Private Message import runs. I will then upgrade the software from Xenforo 1 to Xenforo 2, add styling, addons, ajax chat, etc. What the conversion means 1 Due to some bugs in Xenforo's converter, we are going to be paring down groups to the bare minimum. The Top Posters group for example will go away, but we will work something out once back on Xenforo. 2 Private messages are going to take an extremely long time to convert. The rest of the forum will take a couple hours though the theme will be sad for a bit. I am going to be rewriting the PM conversion entirely but, nonetheless, it may take days. Looking through the source code, it's running a query for each PM. Meanwhile, private messages may be unusable during the conversion period. I will see what I can do to address this. 3 The converter doesn't convert the personal notepad. I've been thinking of converting it, but a lot of people misunderstand what it does, using it for their bio thinking others can read it. Make a backup of your personal notepad, now or after I put up the notice . 4 Some BBCode doesn't convert over well. Please feel free to point out problems, but some things like predefining the size of an image tag doesn't convert well at all. 5 Make sure you know your password. Make sure you can get e-mails from us in case you need to recover your account. You will be able to log in with your current password, but I know some of you rely on staying logged in forever. Options for Private Messages 1 Option 1 Remove the efficiency block in Xenforo's official converter, and run as-is. Simple and should be relatively fast. May take a day. 2 Option 2 One Private Conversation per member that you've actually has PMs with. Somewhat memory intensive, but not exactly a problem when I run the server. Otherwise, this should be fairly straightforward and about as fast as the first option, just taking a bit longer to setup. 3 Option 3 Breakdown by title. The thing is this would require text matching. Across twenty million private messages. And heaven help you if during your roleplay one of you decided to be snarky and change the title. Right now, I am heavily leaning towards the second option, though I will listen to opinions. This isn't a democracy, yadda yadda but if someone thinks they are really fucking clever I have ears. Note This is just for the conversion. After the conversion you'll be able to make new conversations with people as needed. Finally, obviously this was not free. I do hope some of you who have come to enjoy using the site will consider supporting us - see the Paypal and Patreon links at the top of the forum. Every bit helps. Thank you.