PJRC and Teensy(s) need a Wiki

Ok, I know this is crazy talk, but....

Perhaps we should consider migrating from vBulletin to XenForo before making any really substantial forum changes or integration with a wiki? Today we're running very close to the original stock vbulletin. I believe our only customizations are the Are-You-A-Human check, the recent 3-reports=moderation, changing wording and removing unused stuff by editing templates (the "forum rule"), and various configuration.

XenForo (and many others) can import from vBulletin. But the import scripts only understand the stock database tables and configuration. The farther we stray from the stock setup, the more painful migration will be.

When we bought vBulletin three years ago, some people were already claiming it had jumped the shark, not long after the original company had been acquired. The new owners launched version 5, which wasn't going so well then (the reason we went with version 4), and apparently v5 still isn't working well. At the time, vBulletin 4 still seemed the best alternative. Even now, many people still recommend it as the most mature and stable forums.

Today, vBulletin 4 seems like a dead end, and version 5 appears like it's never going to mature.

Apparently some of the original vBulletin developers left the company to start XenForo. It was not at a really usable state 3 years ago. Lawsuits were also in play, which were settled in 2013. Even if there's no source code in common, XenForo is clearly modelled from vBulletin, but with a LOT more development invested in recent years. I spent a little time using it, and wow, it's so similar but seems greatly improved and much more polished all around.

There also seems to be a pretty good community of add-on products. VaultWiki supports it, and there's a MediaWiki bridge. A simple reports to automatic moderation mod exists. It's also now on AreYouAHuman's supported list.
 
Can't say I'll be unhappy to see you leave vBulletin behind, only too happy to help with comparisons between wiki installs for that one too - glad to see most recent comment on MediaWiki Bridge is that the problem with latest MediaWiki is quite easy to fix :)
 
Can't say I'll be unhappy to see you leave vBulletin behind, only too happy to help with comparisons between wiki installs for that one too - glad to see most recent comment on MediaWiki Bridge is that the problem with latest MediaWiki is quite easy to fix :)

Ditto. I don't think anyone is attached to the forum back end. What matters more is if all accounts, links, and postings survive the transition.
 
Xenforo looks pretty good, looks like if we go with mediawiki users will have to learn to use its syntax to edit wiki's while vaultWiki seems to use the same editor as xenforo.
 
The mediawiki syntax is easy, and last time i was playing with mediawiki (years ago) there were some better editors in development
 
What matters more is if all accounts, links, and postings survive the transition.

Yes, that's pretty much by thought too.

In hindsight, I probably should have put all of vbulletin into a subdirectory. XenForo has a redirect add-on that will supposedly allow all the old URLs to redirect to the new forum. It's probably going to take some fiddling to get it really set up well. The alternative might be to keep vbulletin around as read-only pages. Isn't that what Arduino did with their forum when migrating?

XenForo might handle attachments differently too. I definitely want to preserve all the attachments, since there's a lot of really useful files on many threads.
 
That's a shame about vbulletin, it has been king of the forums for at least 10 years. I was a moderator on the now defunct bboy.org for years and learned to love vbulletin because it just seemed to work.

phpBB was an excellent alternative except for the massive spam problems out of the box.

But if the latest version is not being well loved it will die. Forums themselves are dying in their own right as well - one of my (many) other hobbies is dancing:
just in the sphere of dance:
bboy.org = died, then closed down
mrwigglesforum = dead
westcoastpoppin = dead

That won't mean anything to you but those 3 were the only place to go back in 2007.

It's all facebook these days! But facebook is no good for geeks like ourselves....

But yes the important thing is keeping all those posts, attachments, and retaining the links etc.
I recall an update @ bboy.org corrupted every single attachment / graphical image once, everyone's avatar was a mess, every attached video clip, the works - which was bit of a disaster really. The op never did fix it all, you could tell you were looking at an old post because was everything was a total mess.

Be warned, backup, backup, backup, backup........SQL and files. I don't need to tell you that but thought I would anyway ;)
 
News: Steps are being taken, tests are afoot, and there might even be real news by the weekend - I'd tell more but I don't see what I am doing (and therefore (at least a bit) in the know about) as being my stuff to elaborate on.
 
Users for sure, threads in ignore is a concept I haven't seen before - last time I 'ignored' a user in VB (aside from just 3 minutes ago) I still got their threads in my 'new posts' (and similar lists) but I think even their titles were hidden, only nonsense I had to see any more was their username.
 
We'll be doing some testing very soon on Xenforo. I'll be sure to add checking out the ignore feature to my test list. Years ago I used the ignore feature on a forum that used VB and found it very useful. I would be surprised if it isn't available on Xenforo.

Our first step is to decide on the final forum environment (Stay on VB or switch to Xenforo). Once we do that and make any necessary changes we'll make a decision on which wiki to use and implement it.
 
If you have PHP experience (good if experience with MW or xF PHP in particular) and you would like PJRC to (at least be able to) consider MediaWiki as a candidate for their new wiki then please PM me - the MediaWiki xenForo bridge isn't quite as 'far back' as the bridge for vB but I am concerned that I may not manage to fix it (enough) for the current versions quickly enough to 'get it on the table' in time to allow decent review of it before those guys feel the need to proceed with something.
 
Back
Top