Being the owner of a site with roughly 4 million posts, and about to migrate from vBulletin 3.8.x to Xenforo shortly, I can understand completely what the staff here at Sitepoint has gone through. Identifying a new solution is exhausting and scary. I know I’ll have to deal with a lot of the same questions and scrutiny when we flip the switch on our site. Having used vBulletin since the early days, I share the same conclusions about that script. It just doesn’t work for us anymore, and I’ve watched a lot of site owners move to something else. I don’t like the new versions of vB. We’ve come to the point where we either have to upgrade to a newer version of vB or move to something else. We can’t stay put, mainly due to security issues - vB 3.8 isn’t ideal for newer versions of PHP and MySQL. It’s like trying to run a graphic design business around Photoshop 3 and Windows 95. Do you stick with Windows or move to a Mac or Linux… lots of choices.
Some here talk about how changing website software doesn’t solve everything - no it doesn’t obviously. But not changing software in some cases can be even more detrimental. Site owners have to keep the software up to date and keep the features innovative and the content fresh. Finding new ways to foster user engagement is very important, more so now with new social media sites popping up daily competing for user attention. You need a software platform that allows you to compete for those eyeballs. Xenforo seems to be the answer for many of us who remember what made vBulletin so good 12+ years ago. Personally I’m not sold on Discourse or Atwood’s take/approach on forums - though I do agree with his fundamental belief that forums need to evolve more than they have. Maybe Discourse will work here on Sitepoint. If most of the developers here are RoR experts, that will certainly help. I applaud them for taking the risk and doing it. Having been a member here for a while, I hope the gamble pays off.
Thanks. I appreciate your support. Best of luck with your migration as well. I’d be interested in hearing how you go and what you think of Xenforo. Keep us updated with your progress if you can find the time. 
Yes, good luck with the migration!
I just recently did a migration for a 1.2 million + post vB4 forum to Xenforo as a consultant. The company I worked for are relatively happy although the change management wasn’t spectacular and thus some users (too many in my opinion) were disgruntled. I warned them to do better change management, but my request was basically ignored and only the minimum was done. “Hey folks, we’ll be closing tomorrow to migrate the software.” and that was about it.
I think the most important part for any change is managing the change. Like warning users every step of the way. Giving them reason to actually see the advantages of the change before it happens, like showing why the new forum will be better than the old. etc.
I read your migration warning thread and it is mostly about you and your reasons, other than the security reasons, which only indirectly and only possibly affects users. So in essence, not much is clarified to make users more appreciative of having to change. The forum works for them now, right? Why should it be changed from their perspective? That question needs answering. The same goes for the migration here too, IMHO.
Scott
May I suggest that however you implement this new forum software you allow plenty of user functionality to tweak it to their own fit. For example I notice that the Discourse demo has continuous scrolling, WHICH I HATE. I hate it on Flickr, I hate it in Google, I hate it everywhere. Because it just doesn’t play nicely people like me on a slow connection at work with an enterprise firewall. Lear the lesson from Flickr when it redid its interface for mobile. So, as a general piece of advice based on webmastering since the early 90s, please give users choices to turn this that or the other off. Otherwise I’m outta here.
Thanks Scott, I plan to announce more of the benefits as I get closer. I will be adding a couple of big features/sections to the site and I am going to announce those, along with some of the new added functionality that will be built-in. I have already done this in our private forum to fill in the staff and sell them on the benefits. And actually, our site has had some issues with vB - database errors and other issues that will be solved when we move away from it. That alone will be a big plus. But yes, I will definitely add more benefits to sell them on the new system. What I have found is that new features aren’t as highly regarded as fixes for existing issues, so I plan to focus a lot on those.
That sounds like pretty good change management. As the change management saying goes, you can beat the donkeys with a stick to get them to move, or you can enchant them with carrots. I prefer carrots to sticks anytime, both as a donkey myself and an admin.
Scott
Ah, and the editor alone is miles better. The copy and paste functionality with images is really great. Don’t forget to show that off.
Scott
I’m not a big fan of endlessly scrolling pages either, I like a footer at the bottom!
However, a lot of people do like this “feature”.
AFAIK this feature is deep-coded into Discourse and making it optional, if even possible to do so, would surely require a lot of work rewriting the Core code.
The Discourse team is very busy trying to ship version 1.0 and have a lot on their plate.
Discourse
The good news is that its open-source and available on GitHub, so you could write the code for them and then all could benefit.
discourse/discourse · GitHub
Mittineague, you’re not seriously batting this off back to the user when sitepoint (ie you) is foisting this on users like myself with a dodgy work connection?!?!
Just saying. Since everyone else involved is busy doing more important work at this time, the option and opportunity are there for you to pitch in with something you feel would be helpful to the community at large.
If you would rather wait in hopes that someone else will do it that’s your prerogative.
You could disable JS for the site.
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I hate infinite scrolling, too. You can’t bookmark it. It takes up more and more RAM. jQuery animations and infinite scrolling are probably my two most hated web trends.
I have been studying up on Linux as of late. I have been on a few websites that use that Discourse. The more I see that Discourse, the less I like it. There is no sense of community on Discourse. It’s like a quick question and answer wall and not much more.
So Sitepoint is to become like that, is it? :x
It’s just a forum. It’s the people who visit that create the sense of community.
Edit: actually, what you linked to wasn’t a Discourse site, but a StackExchange site, that runs on the same software as StackOverflow (from what I can tell).
This is an example of a Discourse forum: https://meta.discourse.org/
Fair enough. I can do something about that. I’ll post an update now to keep people in the loop.
So I’m hearing you on the infinite scrolling, because I’m also not much of a fan, but as Mittineague says, that change is fundamental and unrealistic to implement pre-launch. There are going to be things about this change that people don’t like, but that is always the case with change. People don’t like it. We had to make a decision based on whether the pros outweighed the cons, and in this case, they did.
No.
[font=calibri]While I agree that infinite scrolling can be a nuisance, and is generally a right pain on mobile devices because of the amount of processor power it uses – and on sites like Twitter and Facebook, “infinite” more or less does mean that – it isn’t going to be that bad here.
Because of the way Discourse is set up, the URL is changed as you scroll up and down through a page (much like on the new Google Maps), which means that you can get a persistent link from the address bar to share or bookmark, which will take you to a specific post within the thread. If you follow a direct link like that, it will load the thread from that point outwards … so if you jump straight in at post #50, it will not load posts 1–49 until/unless you scroll upwards. The saving in bandwidth and processing from being able to jump straight into the end of a long thread without loading all preceding posts could quite easily outstrip the cost of loading and running the extra scripts that are needed to make it do its stuff.[/font]
Well, fingers crossed I can read it at work. All other sites using infinite scrolling just don’t work well with our IE11 and corporate firewall, so we’ll see. It’s not an aesthetic thing for me, it’s more a case of simply unusable. Don’t ask me why, it just is.
Who knows, it may turn out to be a great change - I do hope so - and most people, however grumpy they get at initial change, usually still return in the end. But giving users a choice is usually a much smoother transition than just saying “it must be like X”.
Thanks for the nudge Scott. I’ve addressed your comment here.