Moving On and Moving Up With XenForo

After spend­ing the last 12 months watch­ing the sta­tis­tics on my Invi­sion Power Board sites tank, I decided it was time to make some changes.

I sold the forum license for one site and gave the data­base to Lisa, over at AdminEx­tra. Two other sites died a mis­er­able death. A fourth site is barely hang­ing on and is likely going to be closed down. But on Thanks­giv­ing Day, I con­verted the T-Bucket Forums from IPB over to Xen­Foro.

A year ago, had you sug­gested I might be run­ning Xen­Foro soft­ware, I would have laughed. I had taken a look at the early releases and didn’t much care for what I saw, to be hon­est. This was prior to the absolutely dread­ful IP.Board 3.1.3 release that absolutely sucked the life out of my sites. I refer to that release as IP.Board Ostrich, for when I tried to give Invi­sion my recorded data on just how ter­ri­bly it was per­form­ing on all my sites, they denied account­abil­ity and buried their heads in the sand.

At some point in early-October, I saw Lisa had con­verted AdminEx­tra from IP.Board over to Xen­Foro. She has put together a really beau­ti­ful style for that site, to replace the rather unap­peal­ing default Xen­Foro style, and I found myself spend­ing a lot more time there. More time than I had ever spent when it was run­ning on the Invi­sion software.

After a month, I decided it was time to cut Invi­sion loose. I had upgraded into their IP.Board 3.2 branch and my Google Ana­lyt­ics num­bers were wors­en­ing by the day. I went ahead with the pur­chase of a Xen­Foro forum license and set up a test site. I granted some mem­bers of the T-Bucket Forums access to the test site and their response was over­whelm­ing. My orig­i­nal plan was to con­tinue with a Xen­Foro test forum until after the first of the new year, but every one of the mem­bers who saw it was beg­ging for me to move for­ward with the conversion.

Early Thanks­giv­ing morn­ing, I closed down the Invi­sion forum for the final time, uploaded the Xen­Foro files and began the data­base import. After just 34 min­utes, the import was fin­ished and I was able to start check­ing per­mis­sions, in order to get the site opened back up.  The great design­ers at Xenique have a really great-looking DXF-Red style that sim­ply works with our tried-and-true forum logo, so I imme­di­ately installed it.

After nearly three weeks on Xen­Foro, my forum mem­bers are all happy with the change. No more grum­bling about the Invi­sion soft­ware. I am extremely pleased with how eas­ily I adapted to the Xen­Foro Admin Con­trol Panel and how sim­ply I can make changes to the forums. My Ana­lytic num­bers are all being res­ur­rected from the dead, our daily active mem­ber num­bers are bet­ter than they have ever been and our aver­age daily post count has dou­bled. My mis­er­able bounce rate num­bers are drop­ping, the aver­age time on site num­ber con­tin­ues to climb, my search engine vis­its are bet­ter than they have been in well over a year and my search long­tail is finally headed in the right direc­tion. My ad rev­enue is noth­ing short of incred­i­ble. In just 12 days of Decem­ber, I am already dou­ble what I earned dur­ing the month of November.

I want to thank Lisa for all her help and advice dur­ing this con­ver­sion.  When I was up to my back­side in alli­ga­tors, she always stepped in to remind me I was to be about drain­ing the swamp.  When I was con­fused with how Xen­Foro han­dled cer­tain func­tions, she was always there to point me in the right direc­tion.  When I was look­ing for ways to dis­play site infor­ma­tion, she showed me just how eas­ily I could set up cus­tom pages in Xen­Foro.  She took XenForo’s gen­tle learn­ing curve and made it flat for me.  Lisa, I owe you.  Big style.  And I thank you for all of your help.  For any­one look­ing for a friendly com­mu­nity for blog and forum admin­is­tra­tors, I can­not rec­om­mend AdminEx­tra enough.

And now, I see Invi­sion is tout­ing yet another second-point release of IP.Board. And can you imag­ine, they are talk­ing about all their new SEO improve­ments. Yes, this is the same Invi­sion who assured me, in Decem­ber 2010, their soft­ware had no SEO short­com­ings or issues.  If any­one at Invi­sion is won­der­ing where my license renewal fees are, come take a look at the T-Bucket Forums and you will see where the money was spent.  And well-spent, I might add.

With Xen­Foro, I’ve redis­cov­ered the abil­ity to oper­ate a suc­cess­ful forum community.

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Tagged as: AdminExtra, Invision, IP.Board, T-Bucket Forums, XenForo