Wow - 11 years

[Jim Becker]

Keith,

What is the reason for the change from vBulletin to Xenforo? I am so familiar with vBulletin on Sawmill Creek and other forums and it works really well from a user perspective.

Roger

The vBulletin version SMC has is "broken", and the "upgrade" isn't much better and also cannot do many things natively like Xenforo can. Xenforo was written by a bunch of folks who left the vBulletin team a few years ago when they got tired of all the problems. It's more stable, more extensible and pretty much works the same way from the end-user standpoint. No worries. I've already been through this conversion at another site I help moderate (different topic) and it went smoothly. And folks had pretty much instant, native support for the kinds of devices that they use today to interact, unlike with vBulletin.

[Keith Outten]

Jim's right, we are running vBulletin version 4 which they have stopped offering support and security upgrades. We purchased version 5 and installed it as a test site and it had so many problems/bugs we wouldn't dare use it for The Creek. The current version 4.2.5 we are now running required our server adminstrator to correct a multitude of problems when he installed the upgrade.

Xenforo provides native support for mobile users which is a major improvement and since over 40% of our Members are connecting using mobile devices its important that we improve access for mobile users. There is a pretty long list of other improvements but the bottom line is that we can't move forward at this point with vBulletin.