BankFodder

Truncating is an excellent idea, of course – but I hope that we will be able to choose which groups receive truncated emails.

For busy site team, it is extremely convenient to be able to read the entire content in the email rather than have to go to the particular topic.

I absolutely confirm that it is worthwhile doing a number of test conversions and having a test site where plug-ins and applications can be installed in order to understand how they work and whether they cause any problems.

The idea of modifying your existing site to look like your forthcoming Invision site is brilliant – and I don't know why I hadn't thought about it myself. Unfortunately, we carried out our conversion about a week or so before the above article was written.

Our old vBulletin site was pretty heavily modified after 13 years of use and so it's taken a lot of work to find plug-ins to replicate their functionality. I agree that too many plug-ins probably slow down the site – and we probably have too many plug-ins! But I shall be looking to rationalise them over the forthcoming weeks/months.

It's certainly true that traffic seems to reduce a lot after the conversion and I hope it is also true that it will pick up again.

There are various things which are confusing – including the huge number of notification possibilities. It is worth understanding how they work.

Also, the business of configuring administrators and "super admins" took a bit of getting used to – although it is starting to come together.


Finally I have to say that the support here is excellent. I felt rather embarrassed with the amount of questions I was bombarding the Invision team with that even if they got fed up, they never let it show.

 

I absolutely confirm that it is worthwhile doing a number of test conversions and having a test site where plug-ins and applications can be installed in order to understand how they work and whether they cause any problems.

The idea of modifying your existing site to look like your forthcoming Invision site is brilliant – and I don't know why I hadn't thought about it myself. Unfortunately, we carried out our conversion about a week or so before the above article was written.

Our old vBulletin site was pretty heavily modified after 13 years of use and so it's taken a lot of work to find plug-ins to replicate their functionality. I agree that too many plug-ins probably slow down the site – and we probably have too many plug-ins! But I shall be looking to rationalise them over the forthcoming weeks/months.

It's certainly true that traffic seems to reduce a lot after the conversion and I hope it is also true that it will pick up again.

There are various things which are confusing – including the huge number of notification possibilities. It is worth understanding how they work.

Also, the business of configuring administrators and "super admins" took a bit of getting used to – although it is starting to come together.


Finally I have to say that the support here is excellent. I felt rather embarrassed with the amount of questions I was bombarding the Invision team with that even if they got fed up, they never let it show.

 

Excellent.


If you do not mind @Joel R I wanted to slightly expand on this.
Those looking to move from VB to the IPS Suite should not see the quoted text as any form of barrier at all.  On the contrary:
It is highly likely that a suitable replacement Theme (VB owners may be more familiar with the term 'style') will be available for their newly converted IPS Suite that either closely matches their original design or is something highly suitable.
A look at the quality themes on offer in the IPS Marketplace by third parties should I think satisfy the majority of those converting over from their VB based community to IPS in that they will be able to find something their community approves of.
Speaking very briefly of modifications, it is quite possible the functionality they required a third party addition on their VB site is possibly built into the IPS Suite, negating the need to look for a replacement. Again a cursory glance at the Marketplace may well reveal something suitable to use in the cases where its something specific in mind, or alternatively a post perhaps in the Peer to Peer support forums where other IPS Suite clients would perhaps be able to point the newly converted Client to a suitable file in the Marketplace to suit their needs.
 
My closing remarks to those considering the move 'over' if you're in any doubt then why not just try out the free 5 day demo to get a feeling of the IPS Suite 'under the hood' so to speak, and I think you'll be very happy with what you see here. 🙂

2 decades as vbulletin big board admin/programmer
A few things to be aware of...
With every major conversion there will be a loss in traffic. If done correctly, you should see traffic levels close to normal in a few months. Prepare for the worse and you will come out on top. This will happen regardless of platform you select.
Create a test site and run conversion. I recommend you do this a few times. This will give you an idea of how long the process will take. You will end up making mistakes so I recommend duplicating your test database first. eg, on one you can prune all private messages and see if that will speed up conversion ... if you have millions and millions of posts you definitely need to have a plan of action
Start changing your old site so that it starts looking like the new. This decreases the shock in change. For example, I changed posts style on old site so that it looks similar to the new theme that I will be using. I also changed main page and directories so that it looks the same.
If you haven't done so switch to HTTPS.
Attachments (images) is a big generator of traffic for many sites - especially if you've been around for years. Although attachments are converted over without issues they are not redirected (old to new url). On a personal note, I literally lost thousands and thousands of Google image placements because of this oversight. This hurts backlinks. SEO.
If you use vbseo/dbseo, if forum friendly urls include forum id then no issues redirecting old urls to new. If in the form of /forum-name/ then these will not be redirected properly. Topic urls will redirect regardless of type.
Learn everything you can on how to use IPS Pages app. It's a very powerful system. You can create any type of directory or custom page with it.
For search, use IPS built in elasticsearch feature if possible. You won't regret it. 
For cache method, use Redis for everything if possible.
Finally, be smart with number of plugins you install. IPS is fast but when you start adding a lot of plugins you could hurt performance.