Cellar new forum software project
 

Now that the cloud move is generally a success, this is the next thing.

As time goes by it becomes more and more important for us to move off of the venerable vBulletin 3 software we have been using for, oh I dunno... 8 years now?

We started with vBulletin 1, and continued to upgrade with it, until it was sold and the new owners began mis-managing it. Never upgraded to version 4, and people are really hating on version 5.

Couldn't we just live on 3 forever? No, with every server move it gets harder to support the software needed to run version 3. You have to upgrade the OS... eventually there are major security issues... it's a long story.

So I have been starting down the path of evaluating new software in order to find something that is great, allows us to do new things... but can be made to look and feel like what we have now.

Whatever we wind up with will not be an exact duplicate of what we have now... but "close enough" should do it.

Oh Noes, the dreaded change. Hot flashes, mood swings, oh the humanity.
But I guess it's worth it to not have to worry about getting preggers anymore. ;)

People say they're afraid of change... but on every corner, there's someone begging for it.

That's the spirit, humor will see us through these troubled waters.
What does this cost? It's a worthy project. Yes it is. Yes. It. Is.

The cost will be as little as $0.

But there's work involved. Yesterday night I started a converter chewing on all the Cellar data to see how it would fit in MyBB. Once it got to the attachments, it slowed down. It's working on the 30,000 or so attachments, it's through more than half of them now. Here's the CPU graph of the test system.

http://cellar.org/2015/cpuload20151216.png

How about Invision Pro Board? Speaking as a member of Ex Isle Forums, IPB's pretty easy to use...from a member POV.

'course, it ain't free...for board owners.

I don't think I've ever come across this phrase.

Up for consideration are MyBB, PHPBB, Xenforo and SMF but I will take a look at IPB.

So that's why the whole internet is slow today!:p:

That's because we civilians don't speak that technical jargon. :lol:

Or spent a winter in northern Alaska

Put me down for Xenforo.

Well whaddya know... the test system ran out of disk space before it could complete its 2-day conversion.

The test system is a virtual server about half the size of the Cellar, so that is not unexpected... I was trying to run two Cellars at the same time and convert one to the other... a tall task

No biggie because I can just set up another virtual server for the job, and try again. This time a bigger system with more disk and two CPU cores etc.

I'm kinda "talking out loud" here but I thought you might like to "hear" it.

Maybe if we post in txt spk. :haha: