How Much Do You Care about the "Last Post" Column in the forums?
Michael > April 21st, 2019, 09:11 PM
We're running on very old VBulletin software here at SF-Fandom and need to upgrade soon. I was planning to do this last year but my health problems forced me to defer taking action.
There are a few challenges preventing us from doing a quick upgrade. One is money. My partner and I manage several forums and we don't want to pay for the licenses necessary to keep running VBulletin. They have changed the way they charge for their software since we started using VBulletin many years ago.
There are a few few forum software packages available. The one we're currently testing on a private site is called MyBB. MyBB is community-supported, open source software and it offers a lot of modern capabilities. There are also many themes and plugins to choose from to enhance basic forum capabilities.
We're testing some of the themes and plugins in the hope of preserving our current look and feel. But so far despite everything we've tested, the data transfer from the old database to the new one causes all the "Last Post" entries to be mixed up. When you look at the new forum you see very old discussions and last posts.
Everything transfers over correctly otherwise, as far as I can tell. We can find all the most recent discussions. But for some reason a lot of very old "Guest" posts and threads are displayed first.
While I'm hoping we'll solve this problem soon, we may move the forum to the new platform before then. I suspect that as people respond to discussions the display order will change appropriately and within a week or two the problem will go away. But it may be very confusing at first.
One option I'm think about is to add a new comment to all the most recent discussions in each forum. That will probably fix the aesthetic issue. But that's a LOT of comments from me.
Anyway, if some of you would let me know what you think about this aesthetic issue, that will help us decide on when to move the forums to the new platform.
Thanks for your feedback and input.
And if anyone has done this kind of migration and knows how to fix the problem without deleting a lot of old posts and discussions, I'd love to hear from you.