HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.
I want to migrate the post and data of my Vanilla Forum to another forum (i.e. Discourse o Flarum)
bishwasbh
New
I want to migrate the post and data of my Vanilla Forum to another forum (i.e. Discourse o Flarum), what can I do to migrate data. I would be better if I can get .xml or any portable format for the post to migrate. The main reason of migrating the post is because the post in Vanilla Forum aren't being Search Engine ranked altough the contents are unique: study.webmatrices.com is that forum, with issue.
1
Comments
You would have the same problem with any other forum solution.
From the first looks your forum is just too small to rank in search engines and the OnPage-SEO is too bad as well to perform where you want it.
It’s not the software’s fail, you need to invest more time and work in your forum. 🤷🏻♂️
Unfortunately there are no easy solution to SEO or everyone would be ranking on page one, good content, backlinks and patience are the key as google adds time at the end of their alogorithm to stop people making a fast buck.
...but to answer your question, you would need to ask at your new forum provider if they have a Vanilla importer.
Same problem.
Vanilla has no back up system and no way to migrate out of it.
You can also tell the tone of the developers of this suite with their attacking you and not answering your simple question of how to migrate out of it. (Of course, they don't want you to be able to do that. They want you to buy in to the pay version.)
Simple fact is, the SEO in the GPL suite is crap. It has been since day one. Let's face it though, most things GPL are. They hold back "the good stuff" for the pay versions which are so ridiculously overpriced they wont even list the price on their website at all. It's part of why this forum software, although full of potential, never went anywhere.
If I find a solution to this, I'll post it here and let you know.
It is not the developers answering and no one is attacking.
Well, there is no such thing as a universal forum export format. Don't take this as an attack, because it is really only curiosity: what kind of export did you expect?
Vanilla has an import script for numerous other forum solutions. As soon as you have decided which forum you will use in the future, you should check its import features.
@Gomez_Adams
Simple fact is, the SEO in the GPL suite is crap. It has been since day one. Let's face it though, most things GPL are. They hold back "the good stuff" for the pay versions which are so ridiculously overpriced they wont even list the price on their website at all. It's part of why this forum software, although full of potential, never went anywhere.
The GPL version has the same "SEO" features as the paid version.
SEO is not some kind of magical sauce like some people in the industry want you to believe. It hasn't been about technicalities for years now. Search engines have become really smart: Their job is to parse a website like a human would do, otherwise they would not suit their users needs. If your site is not doing good on search it either is a) very young or b) doesn't have the content users are looking and searching for. SEO nowadays is all about content. No software can really help you with that.
It is also not the responsibility of the software you are migrating from to convert to all possible formats but the other way around (like Vanilla has an Importer). With database structures always changing, everything else would be insane.
You can always just get an SQL dump. Your data is all there.
My themes: pure | minusbaseline - My plugins: CSSedit | HTMLedit | InfiniteScroll | BirthdayModule | [all] - PM me about customizations
VanillaSkins.com - Plugins, Themes and Graphics for Vanillaforums OS
You are going to have a very hard time exporting vanilla to any other format.
I believe that xenforo can import vanilla forums.. and xenforo is a very good choice for a step up from vanilla.
I agree that Vanilla is not the source of your SEO problems. You won't even begin to show up on google until you ave 10-100 times the traffic you have. You should learn a bit more about SEO rather than jumping platforms.
Turns out it can't be done. I even tried exporting the database and importing it to MyBB and from MyBB to Xenforo but it just fried. Vanilla clearly made it to where you're stuck with them in a dead end piece of software.
For free, it's hard to complain. But it would have been very easy to make some money off of offering upgrades and such to the free version. The SEO is simply horrid.
In just three days of Xenforo's SEO my numbers have tripled and my site is number three on results of a search.
Your forum has 44 topics, 164 messages and 5 members and your "site is number three on results of a search"? What search? Have you searched for your impress page? 🤣
But I have to admit: it's looking good and running smoothly. Though one active user should be handled well by any script. 😁
Today, it's number one.
In Vanilla, it never showed up with thousands of posts, threads and replies.
No really: that's great. And you are happy with what you achieved than everything is fine for me. :blumen&girlanden:
It's only the fact that you have posted a link to your forum and that it's all about you and a fistful of friends talking about some linked news articles or about Christmas and cakes. Yes, if I search for your domain name, you rank first. Applause for that 🙌 By the way there are some funny things coming up when doing that search. I had a good laugh when I read you were blaming the developers of phpBB to actively break your site by doing updates on it. 🤣
Wow. Cry more. I didn't realize you cared so much about a guy with a small site for friends being happy that something worked out.
But I understand how you, the end all be all super-guru of all things internet feel obligated to crush those beneath your station. Do continue to show yourself to be the overbearing, non-helpful, attacking troll that you are.
Because it will, in the end, save the small folks to come along like me from ever using your product.
You, sir, are the epidemy of everything that is wrong with Vanilla Forums.
Congratulations!
I should continue my concepts of the “Autoban Narcissists Plugin”.
Searching for study.webmatrices.com - why?
You already have the url then...
Try and search for "study webmatrices"
No result
Then search for
"Vanilla forums"
"Wiki pedia"
"Git hub"
"My sql"
You're missing the point.
Search for "the greatest page in the universe". What you'll get as the number one result is maddox.xmission.com. He named his PAGE the greatest page in the universe, so when you search for it you find him.
We had a similar issue with Vanilla. We no longer have that issue with Xenforo. Now, that could be down to only one thing: the SEO. Nothing other than that really changed. And sense we have no access to the SEO settings in the OpenGL version of Vanilla, we'll never know.
It's quite easy for you to say "they're the same" and call it a day. But when we have a completely different result by simply switching
software's, well...what else could we think?
The funniest part of this entire thread is that once again everybody is attacking the OP and me over SEO. Not one of you have bothered addressing the original challenge of how can we migrate OUT of Vanilla?
Again, that tells you all you need to know about the caliber of people on this site.
In closing, I'd like to say I actually really like Vanilla Forum. The way it works, the simplicity of the layout reminds me a great deal of the old days of Quark Express. That really appealed to me.
The limitations on other things though kill it in the end. I don't think it would have taken much to turn it into a real winner. Who knows, maybe someday it will be and we'll be moving back.
Best of luck!
The funniest part of this entire thread is that once again everybody is attacking the OP and me over SEO. Not one of you have bothered addressing the original challenge of how can we migrate OUT of Vanilla?
I doubt if any forum software provider would give you the means to move away from their software,that would be silly, like I said you have to go to the new forum and find out if you can import from vannlla to there. It is never easy to migrate because each software is radically different, which is why you should choose carefully to begin with.
If you are paying, you have a right to complain IMO, if it's free you only have the right to ask (politely) for help.
I doubt if any forum software provider would give you the means to move away from their software,that would be silly, like I said you have to go to the new forum and find out if you can import from vannlla to there.
Vanilla went out of their way to make it hard to do either.
It is never easy to migrate because each software is radically different, which is why you should choose carefully to begin with.
Not true. It's relatively easy between most of the more main stream forum softwares. MyBB, Xenforo, vBulletin make it fairly easy in most cases.
Vanilla, again, is the only one I've dealt with that don't.
If you are paying, you have a right to complain IMO, if it's free you only have the right to ask (politely) for help.
Which was done on multiple occasions by multiple people and was met with ridicule by the staff here and completely avoided by most of the posters.
I understand you'll defend to the death your software choice, but that doesn't mean there aren't gaping holes not only in it, but in how it's support (or rather the complete and total lack thereof) are run.
Search for
"IOE WRC - IOE Entrance and IOE Admission [Win IOE Exams]"
that content is unique enough https://study.webmatrices.com/ comes in 3.
Search for
"big green forum"
will give you https://eggheadforum.com/ as first result,
That is a Vanilla Forums forum.
Search is unique.
Search for
"technology-and-support sonic"
will give you community.sonicwall.com as first result.
That is a Vanilla forums forum.
Search is unique.
Search for
"MoneySavingExpert forum"
will give you https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/ as first result.
That is a Vanilla Forums forum.
Search is unique.
Searching for
"Web Study - Online Study Forum"
will not give https://study.webmatrices.com/ - as the words a commonly used.
Search is not unique.
Searching for
"Web Study - Online Study Forum bishwas"
will give you https://study.webmatrices.com/ - as first result - as it is a unique search.
Searching for
"Web Study - Online Study Forum webmatrices"
will give you https://study.webmatrices.com/ - as first result - as it is a unique search.
Search for "the greatest page in the universe".See above
The funniest part of this entire thread is that once again everybody is attacking the OPWrong, we do not need to agree - but if that is attacks to you -you will get a wake-up call if someone actually attacks and trolls you.
Not one of you have bothered addressing the original challenge of how can we migrate OUT of Vanilla?https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/261883/#Comment_261883
https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/261890/#Comment_261890
https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/261891/#Comment_261891
https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/261893/#Comment_261893
Again, that tells you all you need to know about the caliber of people on this site.Frankly, your acting here tells everything people needs to know about your caliber.
I understand you'll defend to the death your software choice, but that doesn't mean there aren't gaping holes not only in it, but in how it's support (or rather the complete and total lack thereof) are run.
Of course but you can only compare with other free software and the way I see it the likes of SMF and phpbb are stone age compared to Vanilla.
Of course Xenforo, VB and dare I say the commercial version of this are better but they cost hundreds of dollars.
The OP mentioned discourse and flarum, I believe discourse has to be installed directly via docker, it won't work with Cpanel eg.
As for Flarum, I left when I saw this.