Forum software

[stevehouse]

Hi all,

I've been running a website for around 17 years that has evolved gradually over that time. It's remained very basic in terms of how it's put together (I'm not a very techy person unfortunately). For the last 10 years we've used vbulletin 3 for the forum.

I've recently received a report from Google saying that I have over 4500 pages with mobile issues! I've also heard from someone that sites that aren't mobile friendly will get penalised by Google in the search results in the near future. I've already noticed that we're starting to slip and suspect this is due to not being mobile friendly.

Is there an easy/straight forward way for me to make my forum mobile friendly?

The Overclockers forum looks to be vb3 yet it scales when you resize the screen. Is this the case?

Any help or advice greatly appreciated...

Many thanks

 

[Mynight]

Overclockers is XenForo now.

Two choices either upgrade to latest VBulletin or swap to another.

There is a migrations person for XenForo on here they give the impression it's pretty easy to swap over.

As for making your current setup mobile friendly there may be some themes for that version that are but it would be easier to just upgrade and eat the cost. If you're running a custom theme you will probably have to redesign.

 

[stevehouse]

Thanks for the swift reply. It would be great to hear from the ZenForo (Xenforo?) person as I'm tempted to go down that route...

 

[Mynight]

My bad, yes XenForo sorry .

Hopefully @kindai doesn't mind me poking them for you.

*cough*commission*cough*

 

[kindai]

Haha, thanks for the tag Yea I work for XenForo.

Yea, moving to XenForo from vb3 is very easy, do a couple every day, how large is your forum?

 

[stevehouse]

Hi Kindai,

Nice to meet you

Here's the summary of our forum:

Threads: 13,534, Posts: 208,480, Members: 2,453, Active Members: 1,045

One slight difference is that I add all new members myself though the backend. Basically a new member buys something from our online stop and gets added to the forum by me using their real name (from credit card details) as the username. This is to stop the hassle and constant moderating needed when we were open to all. Can I do this in Xenforo?

Also, the current VB install has VBSEO on it. What happens to the URLs to all the posts when converting to Xenforo?

One last thing, I inject a menu at the top/header of the existing forum for the rest of the site (which isn't currently mobile friendly), could I do this in Xenforo? I'm planning to redevelop the non forum parts of the site as a Wordpress site so am trying to figure out how I'd incorporate our forum as part of that....

Many thanks