New PIAF Forum + More

As you know, we continue to search for a better forum and overall support solution for PBX in a Flash that could more directly involve more of our current users and gurus.

As part of that effort, we are trying out spruz. Please have a look at your convenience and give us your feedback below.

And, no, we do not yet know whether we could migrate all of our existing content to the new platform. But... we're working on it.

Initial impressions, the site is slow. It's taking me 10-15 seconds to move between pages.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at upgrading your vBulletin license to the new Publishing Suite?

What are you looking to accomplish, maybe someone can offer some insight into a platform that has worked for them...

We're using the free Spruz offering currently. We will switch to the paid offering in a few days and have been told that the performance is much better. We'll see.

As for what we're trying to accomplish, we want a more current platform that integrates all of the components into a single entity. This includes something equivalent to the Nerd Vittles WordPress blog that could be focused on PIAF and expanded to other contributors. Also on the wish list are more hierarchical forums, wiki, video tutorials, chat rooms, private discussion groups for contributors and gurus, messaging, calendar of events, Google Analytics, and more decentralized management so that different contributors can take responsibility for different components.

Haven't really looked at much from vBulletin because of what we found to be extremely serious security issues in the platform. We've actually rewritten a good bit of it to keep the bad guys out. But that in turn has made upgrades all but impossible. Attempts to work through the security concerns were met with righteous indignation, then stonewalling, then an acknowledgement that the platform never could be really secure on shared hosting servers because each user is essentially running as root insofar as Apache is concerned. Never mind the vulnerable code base! SO... no, vBulletin is not on our radar.

As a first step, we've now moved the new platform to http://pbxinaflash.us in order to simplify access. We see this as a gradual migration and, if we encounter insurmountable issues, we can certainly move in another direction. It is a very crowded field now. We also could simply stick with what we have.

The good news is that development on the platform appears to be fairly straightforward. I managed to stumble through just about everything in less than four hours. If you haven't taken a look around, please do and let us know what you think...

Is there a mechanism to move the existing content to the new platform?

*edit* I see this question was addressed in the original post. Kudos to WM for answering it again. Ward, you would be a good preschool teacher.

Still working through that one. They've done it for another platform so it's a question of whether it would be worth it for them or whether they will let us do it ourselves. They both use PHP and MySQL as I understand it.

I went thru a forum fork a few years ago on another project. It was a poorly organized transition and resulted in a loss of momentum. I have more confidence in our PIAF overlords.

I think it is worth a lot to have the content ported over, it makes things a bit confusing when you direct people to the old forum for answers. There are also those of us with personality disorders who evaluate our self worth by our post count.

Thanks for the feedback. Performance has certainly been a major issue. And we can add an inability to migrate from vBulletin as a serious deal-breaker. We'll take a good, hard look at xenforo. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

+1 xenforo

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/a-success-story-one-month-after-moving-to-xenforo.13856/

Ward would know the definitive answers to these questions - This is just what I know from my perspective.

Yeah. We've given up on spruz. Will try some of the other suggestions when we have some time.