Birched

Could you expand a bit on this thought?

Hi all, I am at the early stages of migrating/converting a big old forum. To give an idea of numbers, if I can get our archives back in nicely, it currently sits at around 15k forums, 150k topics, 8 mill posts. We currently use many of our forums a lot like clubs are used here, so I'm planning to shift a bunch of those forums to clubs (I'm guessing 2-3k clubs, with avg 4-6 forums inside each one.) During the conversion process, I've already run into a couple of snags that make it clear that most IPS sites are not dealing with this volume (for example, assigning group permissions to forums appears to be designed for a couple of dozen forums.... Also, IPS support says that they consider more than 100 forums a lot.) So far, I've been able to troubleshoot and push through (albeit slowly), but I'm wondering: are any of you running boards of this size, in particular with this many forums and/or clubs, and if so, have you got any pointers? I know that for vBulletin I ended up going as far as profiling the code and making some point changes for efficiency; I am hoping that isn't necessary here, especially if some kind and industrious soul has already done some optimisation. Thank you for any ideas or suggestions!

Think I got it -- I had to deselect more options prior to the convert (of the deselectable options, only forums and gallery can remain selected.) That error message could definitely be improved with some guidance for people converting from vBulletin 3.8.x.

I seem to be hitting a snag early on in the conversion process when testing the first steps of a migration. I get an error "Failed to count rows in table 'cms_widget' - is your table prefix set correctly?" when I try to start the conversion after step 3, "database details". This is not a table that exists in my vBulletin installation, so I'm not surprised it's failing, but as far as I know it isn't a part of vBulletin 3.x. Do I need to do some editing of install scripts or something? Is there an easy fix to this? There is no option for just vBulletin 3.8.x (it's combined with vBulletin 4.x) so I assume that's part of the problem.

I'm trying to spend some time every day lurking in these forums and playing on a test site to learn and get myself calibrated to what will be required for the migration I am planning. It looks like a big task and I am pretty sure I will have to hire some help for some of it, but for now: a couple of questions. I've been reading today about how bbcode is on its way out here (and custom bbcode is already not supported.) Although that's awesome news for mobile users, this strikes fear into my bones! We have lots of custom (and sometimes somewhat complicated) bbcode. I'm not going to go into some long list here; instead, I want to ask about two particular additions to our site that I have not been able to find. There is a reasonable chance that it's because I didn't know where to look, or was looking for them with the wrong words! 1. Private sections in posts: We have a bbcode 'secret' that allows anyone to specify a list of usernames who will be able to read the contents of the tags (moderators can read them all.) E.g. [secret="someusername"]Only someusername and moderators can see this.[/secret] Does this functionality exist in a plugin (or should I be calling it an "app"?) perhaps to add a button to the post editor? I was unable to find it in the marketplace, but I also found it was difficult to search for button extensions to post editing there, perhaps I was missing some terminology. 2. Private threads: We have a functionality at thread creation where any thread creator in certain subforums can specify a list of users who can (or, alternatively, can't) read the thread. Again, moderators are excluded. Does this functionality exist in the IPB core or somewhere in the marketplace? I feel like this one is more likely to already exist, but I failed to find it. Thank you!

Yes. Indexed and still available, but it's fine if it takes longer for archived material, or for a search that includes the archives. Basically, we are sitting on almost 20 years of material that people still go back to at times. One of the attractive things about IPB for me is that there is built-in logic to serve our most recent content faster, while still maintaining access to our older ("archived") content.

Hi all, I am converting our site to IPB and am wondering whether there's anything I should be on the lookout for when it comes to moving content into the clubs structure. We are a storytelling/play-by-post site, and right now we have thousands of subforums where the person running each game is a moderator in that space. I would like to move all these to clubs, with a 1:1 mapping of a games:clubs. One thing I am wondering is whether I will still be able archive clubs and club content using the IPB infrastructure for marking old/archived content (as I understand it, this content is flagged in the DB and omitted from most searches to speed things up?) If you have tried running many clubs and had to overcome issues, I'd love to hear about it! If you have any general pointers or concerns that you think I should be thinking about, please let me know! I know that with our previous software we ran into issues in various places where the designers had clearly not expected so many forums, creating administrative nuisances (e.g. html select menus with thousands of entries that are difficult to navigate). My primary concern is the user experience, but the moderator/admin experience is also important. Thank you!

(Caveat: I am currently converting our site, so it's not currently running IPB, but this answer should be generic.) We have been producing a podcast. The most basic way to do it is to have a text file on your server (xml file) and edit it to add a new entry every time a new podcast comes out. It is not too complicated. A plugin to simplify the process would no doubt be great, but if you just want to get your podcast out there, you can roll up your sleeves and do it. You can take a look at our xml file at http://rpgcrossing.com/podcasts/rpgx_radio.xml When I edit this file, I typically copy and paste the previous 'item' entry and then modify it for the new episode. I always verify the new file before continuing at these two sites: https://castfeedvalidator.com/?url=https://www.rpgcrossing.com/podcasts/rpgx_radio.xml https://podba.se/validate/?url=https://www.rpgcrossing.com/podcasts/rpgx_radio.xml Neither of them catches errors in date syntax, so be careful with that, if you go this route. Good luck!