Upgraded our community forums

0 | published by Danny Halarewich on Thursday, February 10, 2011

We started out using PunBB for our forum software. It was light weight, minimal, fast loading, and got the job done. For a while that is. Over time it started to give us some trouble. So we decided to migrate to IPB which is used for many happy online communities.

The new forums are a lot more robust. Search capabilities are much better, code posting is slicker and we even have a chat room for logged-in members! It also supports sign-in using Twitter, Facebook Connect and openID.

Everyone's existing accounts look to have migrated over nicely. All forum threads and message have also been migrated over. Old URLs even re-direct to the new URL structure.

The only problem is private messages - those could not be migrated. The reason is that PunBB is so lightweight (benefits sometimes turn into flaws!) that it does not include a private messaging feature out of the box. We had to install an extension to add this feature. So, the IPB converter could not migrate that data.

If you really need to access an old private message, get in touch with us and we'll help you retreive them.

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