Forum software.

[daisukeM]

I dunno but xennobb seems to have shut down. Perhaps time to change to another forum software. SMF, phpbb2, myBB or paid software like vbulletin.

im just suggesting because i don't want this forum to disappear by hacking.

[Herbert]

We already considered a software change although this is not that easy because all this diffrent forum software runs in diffrent ways.
Changing witout losing any data is not that easy

[daisukeM]

i quite like hiow xennobb works.. When changing to a dif software it is especially hard to keep attachments and things. you should consider vbulletin or IPB they are very helpful.

[Chman]

From my experience, vBulletin and SMF are the ones to go for. There should be importers to convert databases from xennobb (although I'm not sure about attached files/images).

Tom

[daisukeM]

Yer vbulletin is nice. I use it myself.. They have pretty much everything currently being used by this board. You must have seen vfxtalk and cgsociety using vbulletin. Anyway its ur forum so you decide ;) If you need help ask me. ;)

[Herbert]

Hi!

I already talked to the guys from vbulletin about changing the forum software - the they told me that the have not converter for XennoBB just for a similar software.
They couldn't tell me if this would work.

[daisukeM]

yer since xennobb is quite small and has vanished.. but i still like ur forum Herbert ;)

Another prof forum software is Invision Forum(known as IPB), odforce(houdini forum) uses it. They integrated wiki in their forum so it is something nice feature to have for realflow. :)

mm jus checked they dont seem to convert xennobb either..
http://www.invisionpower.com/community/board/convert.html

but try requesting that you wanna buy their software if they can convert it.

I just found out more about xenno..
http://www.surfionline.com/archives/2006/09/20/mybb-has-a-legal-run-in-with-xennobb/

[daisukeM]

It was quite hard to find any solution.(you can stay with xennobb but not the best..)

You can use a punBB converter to convert xennoBB to phpbb2 with a slight change in the converter. See this thread.
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=480952&p=2641866&hilit=xennobb#p2641866

to SMF
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=134251.0

i recommend,

1.vbulletin
2. IPB

free:
1. myBB
2. SMF
3. phpbb3

How about starting over clean? I will still b here. :)

[Noproblem]

I prefer PhpBB. It is a nice software and free. Also it's open source so integrate it into your site and do really cool things. It has an active forum where the development staff remain quite active to help you with bugs you may encounter.
Demo : free forum

[lukeiamyourfather]

Noproblem wrote: I prefer PhpBB. It is a nice software and free. Also it's open source so integrate it into your site and do really cool things. It has an active forum where the development staff remain quite active to help you with bugs you may encounter.
Demo : free forum

Indeed something else would serve our purposes much better than XennoBB (especially since XennoBB is stolen source code and defunct) but like the posts above say, it would be difficult to migrate to another forum without losing everything.

Though that's inevitably going to happen whether we want it or not because a day will come when XennoBB requires dependencies that are not available on the server anymore (like a defunct version of PHP). Migrating sooner rather than later would minimize the losses. File uploads, better notifications, galleries, wikis, news blog, and many other features sure would be nice.

Just thinking out loud, if the database can't be migrated to another system maybe the current forum could be dumped into a static system that users could download. An offline archive so to speak so that the information is not completely lost.

Its a small community relatively speaking. I tried to start a Wiki on my site but there's been only a few entries other than my own. If there was a tighter integration I think resources like that would be used more because they would be visible. Drupal could be a good candidate when and if the forum moves to something else. Drupal has blogs, forums, wiki, galleries, and so on that are all under the same system with a single login for each user. Wishful thinking I guess. Cheers!