Was it difficult migrating from VB to Xen?

I think the fact you didn't notice for quite a while is a credit to how well the transition went.

We did start planning the migration around July last year, apart from a few problems with our MySQL configuration the import of VB database to Xen wen't really well.

To be honest I was really impressed with just how much data was able to be imported in to Xen, even down to little things like additional registration questions we ask (what consoles do you own for example) how many thanks a member had, even forum permissions. I do find it pretty mad your saying other communities have just scrapped all their content and started over, that wouldn't have been something we ever considered.

More than anything i'd agree with Nimrod that the hardest part was manually editing old posts (partially the tutorials / download sections) to fix broken links, images and such. Nimrod was like a machine doing that and really did get a massive chunk of that done.

I did find some cases where some members had posted some really good guides, but posted the images on imgshack or another image hoster for example which had deleted the images. I did go as far as looking on archive.org to see if the images had been cached there for really good content, which some had so i was able to attach them to the post again on Digiex.

Overall to anyone reading this and thinking about migrating from a legacy VB forum to something more modern, i'd say just go for it. Just ensure your old URL's redirect to the new ones, so Google and re-index your site eventually and any old linkbacks you might have from other sites will still work.

From migrating to Xen some of the features / changes O like are:

• Responsive site - the forum is now responsive, meaning it will adapt to the screen size of the device your browsing on. Something that was just not possible with VB 4 and is now a Google ranking factor.
• Threaded private messages - the amount of times i got 3 or 4 pm's on VB 4 because it was hard for people to see if a message had been sent or not.
• Alerts - I like that Xen can notify you when someone quotes your post, likes it, or even tags you in a comment.
• PHP 7 support - no need to run old versions of PHP for everything to work correctly.
• Edit history - if a post gets edited its now possible to see all the revisions of that post. Handy when updating a tutorial.
• Post attachments - I generally feel this is just a lot more slick and streamlined
• Two factor authentication - With the internet how it is these days i like we can now offer our security conscious members additional security, especially useful for admins / moderators.
• Actively developed platform - We were basically suck in 2011 on VB4, dont get me wrong at the time VB4 was really nice, however VB 5 just never seemed a viable upgrade. I get the impression theirs no real direction with where vBulletin is heading anymore. VB5 almost seems like staring again as it is, mods we used to add functionality on VB4 are no longer developed (we had some great spam filtering ones) then the community isn't really behind developing new mods for VB 5, so your stuck with what you get really. From reading the VB forums it seems every new release introduces additional bugs, going by the public feedback anyway.

I think to sum up we liked how far Xen had come within the years we stuck with VB4 and felt confident about their future and the Xen ecosystem. The community is really active, if we've wanted functionality not included in the box, someone else has already developed this as an add on, which had actively been updated over multiple years.