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vBulletin Import - Large Forum ove 1 million posts
Hi,
I just switch to vanilla and i LOVE it! i toldmy friend who runs fedoraforum.org one of the largest forum around about Vanilla and he love it too. he wants to switch fedoraforum.org to Vanilla however i dont see any vbulletin import tools.
Any plug ins out there for it? and he will defintely help promote vanilla forum!
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Comments
I wouldn't recommend doing any posting with Vanilla while VBulletin still "owns" the tables, but it would be a good way to see how well the dataset and posting frequency fit.
Another thing to consider is that Fedoraforum has had over 75 members visit the board within the last hour--this might be a little on the high end traffic wise--for comparison, Lussumo has had a dozen member visits in the past hour. (source) Reasoning being that since every category is lumped together on the home page, active but slower-paced threads may be "lost" to the second page rather quickly.
Basically, all you do i convert VB into phpBB tables using a converter available at the phpBB site, then you Vanilla's phpBB converter to change it into something familiar for Vanilla.
You get that? It was kinda sketchy steps but that's basically it.
The VB installation I have has over 1.4m posts and 6k members. It also sees 300 concurrent users for most of the day.
I would *strongly* advise not to move to Vanilla.
The reason for this is that whilst Vanilla itself is pretty good, the performance really isn't there yet. Because you will inevitably install extensions, and a hell of a lot of the extensions that you will install to achieve what you see as basic functionality really do not bear performance in mind.
For example I posted yesterday on the Members Page extension thread a warning about how the page does not paginate, and performs a new query for every member on the page. So if I converted my vBulletin I would have a page with over 6,000 queries on it, one for each member. I couldn't write a better Denial of Service tool for someone if I wanted to.
vBulletin also allows memcached to be used, it utilises a datastore for settings, and most pages average 12 queries or less (with a lot of options enabled).
Basically, VB has a ton of functionality that has been shipped that scales, and was written with performance in mind. This is why you can find multi-million post VB forums that still have thousands of concurrent users.
Vanilla is gorgeous, and I prefer the interface. But you use the right tool for the job, and Vanilla is perfect for smaller, slower moving community forums. It has less of a learning curve to get started (for the users) and it's pretty. VB is more industrial scale, it is a pain to get started but scales well and their strict hierarchical structure of forums really do suit very large boards in which topics stay in a certain area.
If he wants to have Vanilla's metaphors and look 'n' feel, then I would suggest that the thing to do is to invest time in building a VB skin that mimics the Vanilla one (don't use Vanilla HTML though, that stuff is copyrighted whereas look 'n' feel isn't - refer to the Apple vs Microsoft case in the late 80's). This means you keep the scalable engine and tools provided by VB, but gives you the look and feel you want.
It would take a serious chunk of work though
nature of the posts, i.e. old stuff fades away, UNLESS someone revives the topic. It's a strength
and a weakness... but it works really well to keep people engaged.
FWIW, most multi-million post forums have at least 80% crud that nobody ever needs to see again
(not unlike the blogosphere for that matter)
So if you can purge old posts once in a while, the only thing to optimize is bandwidth and concurrent
users. I think you can get a long way with the right settings/add-ons... e.g.
Use Dino's Vanilla Packer to significantly reduce connections and bandwidth.
Disable in-line whispers (if only to allow you to cache complete threads)
(see Scaling, Load Balancing and Biggest Vanilla Install)
Avoid the 'discussion overview' add-on or anything else requiring multiple queries
Perhaps an FAQ entry/overview post on the worst add-ons (load-wise) would be useful.
Jamendo seems to be doing quite peachy... though I'd still love to see a real static cache add-on
as per one of the discussions referenced above.
I hope you decide to "Get Vanilla"
:-)