Best Of

A couple weeks ago I did the first full community migration from Vanilla to Flarum. I'm willing to do a few more for free to work out further issues with the forum migration software I'm building.

Criteria:

• non-commercial community
• less than 5 million posts
• no hate speech on site
• timeline is 1-3 months (estimate only, depends on my weekend availability)

Caveats:

I'm not currently able to provide troubleshooting assistance for setting up a new Flarum site. You will need to set it up ahead of time with the appropriate plugins (I will provide a list of standard extensions to use if you want things like badges or private messages to transfer).

You will be responsible for moving files (uploads and avatars) separately. I'll provide instructions for that as well.

You will also be responsible for any redirects you wish to set up. Happy to provide advice from what I know, but that's not something I'm willing to set up for you today.

Workflow:

1. You do a SQL export, zip it, and send me a link via a file service like Dropbox.
2. We'll discuss how to handle special edge cases in your forum and I'll iterate on it for a bit.
3. I'll provide 1 test SQL export for you to evaluate and provide feedback on issues you find.
4. I will fix issues I'm willing and able to, then we'll pick a day for the final migration.
5. Expect a full day of downtime. When ready, put your site into maintenance mode and send the final SQL export the same way. I'll return the finish product the same way.

I will provide a UTF-8 export regardless of what you initially provide. It's important you FORCE the test & final import to use UTF-8 encoding rather than letting the database tool detect and set it itself.

Security:

I'm willing to sign a very, very narrow NDA about data privacy if you require it. However, also note I have far more data security experience than most folks running forums (I drove application-level security efforts at Vanilla Forums Inc for most of its existence), so rest assured your data will only exist on encrypted drives and/or behind 2-factor authentication on my side, and I have no interest in it beyond improving & testing the migration software. The only time it's exposed is while we're transmitting it to each other via Dropbox link. Do not upload a data export to this site.

Interested? Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/rdB1SmgGNPMU6rML6

Private messages on this site are fine, or email me ( linc at icrontic.com ) with questions. Also happy to answer questions about DIY migrations or otherwise talk shop about communities.

I've gone ahead and built a release from the available sources released 4 days ago(!) hidden in the GitHub branches: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/tree/release/2022.021

These releases have been tagged but have not included a built package for some time. I will be testing this for PHP8 compatibility tomorrow.

While it's long tempted me to continue Vanilla, there's a difficult challenge. If you do a "community edition", you have no input on the roadmap. You're just a silent steward tied to whatever the company decides. I agree there's no reasonable hope for collaboration with them at this point. If you do a fork, now you're signing up for a world of maintenance, and you'd have to rebuild the open source developer community to about 2x its highest point to make that sustainable. Having a bespoke framework underpinning the whole thing is a very large maintenance liability and it hasn't kept pace with development trends.

Flarum has a strong development community and has more than adequate feature parity, imo. It's more challenging to install & update for non-developers, but they're working on that with reasonable priority. My biggest quibble with it is the Javascript-heavy UI, but I have plans to address that and most other folks don't share my concern. My preferred path forward for building community software is do it downstream from Flarum, using it as a dependency to make my own system, rather than building something from scratch again.

I just spent a year of my free time building a migration tool from Vanilla to Flarum, so I feel pretty strongly about it. For more info on moving to Flarum if that's your choice, see here: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39195/ready-to-move-to-flarum-i-might-be-able-to-help#latest

I built that tool with the ability to do different output/target plugins for other platforms, so it's fully extensible. That said, making target plugins is more challenging than source plugins because of the peculiarities of each new platform.

I just hit the 13th anniversary of my first code contribution to Vanilla this month. A bittersweet reminder these days, indeed. I really thought it could become the ubiquitous community software of the web, but the writing's been on the wall a long, long time now.

I tried 2021.025 on my forum in production (i'm silly).

I updated my 2021.012 version and i had only a php warning.

version.json file is missing in root directory, so the assets in source code of each page look like

<script src="/discussions/js/library/jquery.js?v=unknown" static="1" defer="defer"></script>

and in the dashboard bottom right, i had version: unknown

Forum works fine but i want to correct this, so, I upload on my website a version.json file with this (found in the vanilla github repo, i changed only 2022.006 to 2021.025)

{
    "x-version-scheme": "{Release version}-{? SNAPSHOT if it's a dev build}",
    "version": "2021.025"
}

now everythings seems ok. I will check my logs to see if i have others errors.

I tried to pass to PHP8 but had a 500 error. I have to check what is failing.

Thank you @R_J and others for your work for this community

Please ignore all the buggy releases after Vanilla 2021.009.

It's important to note the difference between "release" and "version" here: while you might be able to build a completely fine running forum from the sources on GitHub if you are a developer, there hasn't been any release which wasn't usable out of the box since release 2021.009.

I've compiled a 2021.025 version and if you like to give that a try and report your experiences back, we might recommend that until a new release will be published officially.

I don't believe you'll ever see another pre-built copy of Vanilla distributed by the company. I'd love to be wrong, I just don't see it happening, knowing what I do about internal politics there.

I do expect to continue seeing automated unbuilt "releases" like you see on GitHub currently, because those are serving some of their enterprise customers via the Docker installation.

I'm willing to answer questions for any senior members here that want to build, vet, and update the latest version in the addon directory. Unfortunately I'm not willing to lead that process myself any longer. I kept those releases going by my own force of will for more than 5 years and I'm tapped out.