February 17, 20179 yr While SMF has served us well over the years, there are a number of reasons it is time for us to bid it adieu in favor of a new solution. Effective Monday, February 20th, we are migrating the community forums to Invision Power Services. This will result in the forums being put in read-only mode during the migration, so while they will be accessible, no new posts will be accepted until the cutover is complete. We expect this process to begin at 2AM CST (8AM UTC) on February 20th. The expected outage windows is 6-8 hours, but may be extended if necessary to complete the migration. Once completed, the forums will be made accessible to all through the same method as in the past. You will use the same login credentials to access the new forums as the old. The new forum software has a load of new features and a much more modernized look and feel. There are a wealth of features available to us with IPS that we plan to slowly turn on over time. These features will make community engagement here a richer experience for all involved. We're not fools though, and we do expect a possible road bump here or there, so if you find any issues on the new system, be sure to let us know. F.A.Q. Will all posts and content be preserved? Yup, that's the plan and why we are putting the old forums in read-only mode during the migration. The forums are only as valuable as the content therein, so preserving all that history is vital to the success of this project. What about my PMs? Will those be preserved as well? Should be, but please verify when you login to the new forums and if they are not, let us know. What if the migration goes bad? Worse-case scenario, we unlock SMF from read-only mode until we can attempt another migration. What about the wiki? The wiki we use today is dependent upon SMF for users to edit content. This will not change after the migration. As such, we will be preserving the SMF forums in read-only mode at a different URL which we be published after the migration is complete. Users wishing to edit / contribute to the wiki can do so by using the SMF forum archive to login, then visit the wiki to edit it. We are still working on a replacement for the wiki in IPS which we plan to release at a later point in time.
February 18, 20179 yr Hope all goes well with the migration. Despite it happening on Monday, it still can't happen soon enough.
February 18, 20179 yr Exciting times, but got to say, I'll miss the old forum, so familiar I can use it in my sleep. Au revoir my friend!
February 18, 20179 yr Exciting times, but got to say, I'll miss the old forum, so familiar I can use it in my sleep. Au revoir my friend! yeah, I hate learning new forums but its for the better. As long as I have a place to ask my stupid questions I'm happy
February 18, 20179 yr IP forums are better than SMF, but Xenforo is the way to go these days. Good luck. Looking forward to the new facelift.
February 18, 20179 yr I'm slightly nervous about this as so many people rely on the forum, hope it all goes well jonp Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk
February 18, 20179 yr Just wondering about the spam blocking and IP banning. Our current forums are getting hit constantly, with some IP's banging us thousands of times, one well over 20000. Will the current IP and email bans carry over? Or will a new spam blocker be in effect, but having to start over? I only ask because if protection is not active from the start, we will absolutely be overrun by spam, we're on a lot of spambot lists. If there's protection that uses the www.stopforumspam.com database, then over 95% should be caught and blocked. I've been adding notes in our current spam block list about the more prolific spambots, if their return trips approach 100 or greater, and there are a LOT of them! If any moderator or greater wants to examine the block list, take a look at the last dozen pages. The few hit counts with an asterisk mean that that spambot appears to have finally given up trying to spam us. Most never give up. Many wait about a month before returning for additional attempts, often same IP but different user names and emails.
February 18, 20179 yr XenForo has amazing AntiSpam measures built in for admins to setup and tweak. In one single moderator operation mods can delete every single post and ban the account of the spammer. Admins can also undo the sctions if its a mistake, just as easily. On my forums less than 1 out of 100 spammers ever make it through. StopForumSpam is built in for XenForo. No idea how well antispam works with what LT selected or how they have it configured.
February 20, 20179 yr Farewell oh trusty friend, this will be the last post I make on SMF, you've served us well. Good luck with the migration guys.
February 20, 20179 yr Author Ok everyone! hold on to your butts! forum's going down for maintenance in prep for the conversion!
February 21, 20179 yr Wow, this sure took long enough. Back in 2010 I did a forum migration from VBulletin to XenForo with over 1 million posts and we were back up and open in around 4 hours. Factor in improvements to CPU, disk, and RAM and this tiny forum should have been completed substantially sooner. This doesn't exactly install confidence in me, as something must have been wrong; either the old software SMF was absolutely horrible to migrate from, the new software isn't the best, or your hardware is severely underpowered compared to an older system from 2010. Anyways, glad SMF is gone.
February 21, 20179 yr Author 13 minutes ago, BRiT said: Anyways, glad SMF is gone. We are as well. SMF served us well for the time we had it, but it's time to move on to bigger (and better) things.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.