~Max
FWIW vBulletin has always been kind of sloppy about everything, with bloated and inefficient coding. Even -I_ know that and I’m no developer.
This has only gotten worse over the years, so much so that most of their people from their early days are now working somewhere else and who knows what kind of worker is doing the coding nowadays. (Whenever it gets done; I’ve also heard complaints that fixes and upgrades are few and far between.) It has not improved over the decades.
It’s not free; it never has been to the best of my knowledge. But I could be wrong.
Jenny
Just in a huge hurry; had a death in my extended family and I’m up to my eyeballs in problems besides here. So it’s probably my fumbly fingers. Sorry.
Jenny
If you buy message board software, you have to use the database system they support. The most commonly paid and open source message board packages are written in PHP, and support MySQL and MariaDB databases. Few support Postgres. (Remember, the SDMB uses end-of-life (or close to it) versions of PHP and MySQL.)
Looking at other message board packages, it’s much easier and safer to go with something that’s common, which can import the database of a vBulletin 3-based message board. The conversion scripts that come with XenForo, Invision Power Board, and the like do the hard work of converting. Otherwise, you have to hire someone to create a custom conversion script, which involves dissecting vBulletin and the new program to figure out what goes where.
It’s in the best interest of the powers that be to use a message board package that has widespread popularity, and is proven to work with “big boards”. There’s better official and community support. It’s also easier to convert to another format if you decide something else would really work out better. It’s easy to convert from vBulletin 3 to IPB, XenForo, Woltlab Burning Board, phpBB, or Simple Machines, because vB used to be a very popular system, and there’s tens of thousands of potential “converts”. If the SDMB still used UBB.threads (which is still around!), or one of the more obscure open source systems (Phorum, fluxBB, MiniBB, etc), converting would be much more difficult. If you’re lucky, you could use system-to-system hops using unofficial conversion scripts (for example, MiniBB > bbpress > phpBB > XenForo), and hope the final result is usable. If your message board used something that’s now abandonware, or really, really obscure, like WowBB or Discus, you’re screwed.
(Think of it this way – there’s a lot of people who can translate English to Spanish, or French to German. There’s fewer who can translate English to Faroese. There’s even fewer that can translate Faroese directly to Xhosa. Something Awful uses vBulletin, but the version is so heavily modded, it’s like they’d have to find someone who can translate Scots or Gullah into Spanish. They want to leave vB, but the mods make it difficult.)
Converting from one MySQL-based forum system to another can be easy, or really challenging. Converting from a MySQL-based forum system to a PostgreSQL-based system – I don’t even want to think about it. It’s not so much like an English to Spanish translation, but more like spoken English to Spanish Sign Language.
Oh, sorry to hear. I meant Bijou Drain’s post, not yours. I really don’t have anything to add here so I will bow out of the thread.
~Max
I want to thank TubaDiva and the other posters for their contributions to my questions in this thread.
I have a much better understanding of the current problems and the options for migrating to new software.