Moving to XenForo... coming soon!

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As it turned out the import of our social groups would also have been problematic since XF has no social group functionality, so we'd either need to import them into a social groups mod on XF (not a good option) or pay a coder to adjust an old vB4 social groups -> forums converter/importer to work with the new importer we'll be using. Which would take some time again.

Luckily, however, some digging and a little help from a friendly coder on vB.org pointed me in the direction of a little-known vBulletin mod that also contained the functionality to convert social groups and their discussions into proper forums and threads. And what'd you know -- the mod worked exactly as advertised! I managed to copy all the social groups data into a standard forum, so this will now get imported into XF along with all our other forums (I hope!).

Once I have the time I'll go over all the social group content and likely move all the non-MUG stuff into our larger appropriate forums, whereas the MUG social group will likely be reincarnated as some kind of private forum on the XF side. Stay tuned, the test import should be coming very soon now!

Edit: An unintended side-effect of the conversion was a batch of e-mails about new achievements going out to quite a few (inactive) users. This was because the social group posts were converted into proper forum posts and attributed to the users' accounts all at once. But no worries, this was a one-off thing and won't happen again!

 

I've hurried up a bit and reopened the MUG as a private forum. If you're 18 or older, enter the pass "I'm 18+!" to get in.

I've also removed some of the outdated redirect forums and disabled the social groups completely. The non-MUG social group discussions have been moved to the appropriate forums (Whatnots, The Playground, etc.), so you'll find them there. Nothing's been lost, just rearranged!

And saving the best for last, the first test import to XenForo is scheduled for this Friday! Woohoo!

 

As promised, the first test import is done and now accessible to all SPS account holders. Please check this thread for all the info and help us test!

 

Slight delay in moving on with this due to my various RL commitments, but yesterday I've sent a list of issues/problems I spotted in the first import over to the guy doing the import for us, so once those issues are resolved we'll be moving on with the second import, which should require no more corrections. If the second import requires no major further adjustments, we'll be completing the migration a day or two afterwards. All in all, I'm hoping that we'll be running on XenForo within a week's time or so.

 

The current plan is to go ahead with the next import with me standing by to check the last couple of issues right after the import is finished. If everything looks good, we'll make that import the final one and once the boards are reopened, they'll be running on XenForo.

During the entire import/conversion process, the current forums will be closed so that there is no data loss for the migration period. We're scheduling approximately 8 hours of downtime (forums only) for the migration to be on the safe side.

At this point I'm waiting for Slavik (he'll be doing the actual import) to set a date for the conversion, so once that's arranged I'll be posting a general notice here as well.