I'm a big board admin (6m posts, 1000+ users) and I really need to get off of vb3.8. The search load alone is killing me. I did a test conversion to XenForo, and everything worked great, but it became obvious to me that XenForo is a dead man walking. I looked at all the alternatives and for my needs, IPB seems to be the only one that's credibly superior to VB3.8. And that only barely - it took until this year to get an infraction system fully working. Here are my pluses and minuses for IPB that I have figured out so far. Doesn't mention a few things that are not important to me - I don't care about integrating with anything outside the forum, least of all social networks. (Pluses) + These guys seem most likely to have a competent operation into the future. Open source seems to work pretty badly for forums (phpBB has stalled pretty severely, myBB is way behind in features, etc). VB4 is being run incompetently by inexperienced people. XenForo is a two engineer company in legal trouble, which stalled when those two guys stopped being 110% enthusiastic. IPB was never the most popular board, but it still seems like a real company with no obvious business problems. + Roadmap seems good (and they actually talk about it), they want to work on ACP and backend which are weak points. They do eat their own dog food (hosted boards) so there is less incentive to shove features out the door at the cost of tons of bugs. + Supports Sphinx search out of the box. On VB3.8 I'm using the VB built in search with 3 char min, which is not awesome for load. However, does not support Sphinx advanced results ranking. + Has a mobile skin built in. Really, this is 2012, the fact that XenForo didn't consider a built in mobile skin to be a high priority says bad things about their knowledge of real market needs. + Has anti-spam built in. My mods deal with 25-100 spammer signups per day, this could be a godsend. + I actually like the default skin a lot, better than XenForo's. It seems less visually noisy, and I was able to find which button to press a little easier. MUCH better than VB3.8. + XenForo seems to require two paid mods to patch in missing UI elements, IPB is OK without them. I don't care about the cost but if missing stuff was added in a future update, suddenly it would look different from the way the mod did it. + PM system is better than VB3.8 (attachments etc.) although not as good as the modded version of XenForo's conversation system. + Has lightbox for attachments... I'm not actually sure whether my users will like this or not, though. + Has a no-avatars mod (just released), which XenForo does not. Needed to keep the basic style of my existing board, so XenForo would have required me to do some real template surgery. (Minuses) -Heavier resource usage. Queries per page is not too bad, but they say right off to set PHP memory limit to 128 MB and 64 MB worked fine for VB3.8 except in very intense searches. IPB has a reputation for being slow. - Responsiveness of the main UI actually seems slower than VB3.8, even on the initial test board with one post. Easy to confirm because I run them both on the same server at the same time, so IPB is being tested under "load". According to the debug info, script execution is practically instant, but there is a real lag before things actually happen. And it's nowhere close to XenForo's responsiveness, since XF uses a ton of client side scripting. This seems unlikely to change, because adding a lot of client side scripting is a big UI overhaul. - Mod community seems to be less active than either VB4 or XenForo, although VB 3.8 doesn't have perfect mods because people moved to VB4 before updating their mods. XenForo has some mods at a level of technical sophistication well beyond anything I saw for IPB (like the TMS, which re-applies template changes automatically when the software is upgraded). - Mods seem to break every time they release a new version, so there are nice mods (like donation) that aren't supported on 3.3 yet. - ??? Thanks
And why do you think XenForo is "dead man walking"? Next release will have mobile skin built in. In the mean time, Tapatalk works wonderfully. There's also a working WordPress/XenForo bridge and one of the better skin author's is contemplating a full WordPress/XenForo skin. I've used vB 3.x, 4.x, IPB and am now on XenForo. Out of the 4, I'm preferring XF.
If I had a horse in the forum race it would have been XenForo, it's technically excellent, has a nice UI, etc., etc. However, I'm also a software engineer who spent a decade working in Silicon Valley, and I'm very familiar with what happens when companies fail. I just snipped a longer reply because it's off topic, but it's fairly obvious that the XenForo guys are staring at a bad outcome of their lawsuit, decided that working on XenForo won't make their own futures brighter, and have given up on even PR efforts. For that reason I have decided not to use it.
Memory limit of 128M is standard setting in a default install of PHP I believe so I wouldn't worry too much about that. Besides most servers, especially those that run large sites, have an excess of memory anyway. I haven't noticed a slow response time. It could be the cache hasn't caught up with the content yet. On initial page load of non-cached content the response is a tad slower. Once cached it's fast as heck. Mod community is active although I admit some of the mods don't get very good support. Not all mods break on a version upgrade. I am still running mods on my 3.3.2 board that were created for 3.2. All the major mods get updated fairly fast on upgrades. You'll know which mod authors do this and which don't. Same with skin makers.
As somebody in that general boat, I've also considered what we'd do for a transition from vB 3.8. The basic conclusion was that there's nothing compelling enough to make a switch at this time. vB 4 would've been an unmitigated disaster on its release. I also receive far too many "urgent" patch notices in my e-mail box to feel comfortable there if there weren't the rest of the baggage attached. We own the license, but there's no rush for us to try and use it, because it'd be a total rewrite for not a lot of benefit. IPB has been promising as a stable, forward-moving platform, but still just hasn't felt "there". Upgrades across platform shouldn't just be done to feel like your software is current and relevant; it should be because you should actually feel like you're upgrading and I don't feel like I'm doing so heading over to IPB, although at least it has compatibility with most of our "mission-critical" modules. XenForo... love playing with it, I use a license of it for my personal guild forums and it has a good look and feel, but would require too much module development to work for us (not that I'm wholly incompetent when it comes to such things, but I have too much on my plate to play coder -and- game developer in tandem with a 23 year old community). And so the key verdict you see each time from me is... why upgrade at all? Some folks worry about how long vB 3.x will continue to run as PHP, apache, MySQL, et al. continue moving forward. I just installed a personal vB 3.7.2pl2 license on a PHP 5.4.2-1/apache 2.2.22/MySQL 5.5.23-2 box and had to make -one- adjustment to make PHP stop screaming at me (involving authoritative time zone). Even if each month I had to make one tweak like that to keep it running, it'd take years and years of that to match the workload it'd take to "upgrade" just to keep the functionality I'm used to. What about the support? Well, how many critical fixes has 3.x needed in the past few years? Take those and subtract that ones that involved stuff injected in near-meaningless other updates (I'm looking at you, insert-text-into-FAQ-and-get-config.php-parameters issue). Not a whole lot of them, really. I'm willing to provide my own support going forward once the official death-knell comes, because again it'd be a whole heck of a lot less work and I'm lazy. So for me, I'm just not convinced that there's a compelling interest to upgrade from 3.x at this time. Maybe circumstances will change and something compelling will kick in, but I personally won't do it just to "keep up with the Joneses". That's quality time I instead could be spending telling people they should have taken a class in literary criticism before joining our mod team. =) If vB3 really is acting the cranky old dinosaur such that you feel a compelling interest to switch up, I'd say you have a strong candidate in switching up to IPB. They seem to have their heads screwed on, they've grown beyond the mere startup phase, and I actually see some of their guys hopping on forums other than their own (it's an odd yardstick I use, but I have a thing against folks and companies that choose to live in echo chambers). However, if it's going to take more resources to run and your problem already is with slow, then you may be better served giving your vB3 board a last hurrah and bumping up the resources it can use and see if that improves its performance in the near-term. Obviously my opinion, here's your chunk of rock salt to go with it. =)
My critical reason is big board search. 6 million posts... and growing fast. And I have to use the VB default search with three character minimum (ugh). The bottleneck on my board is mysql, and I've optimized everything I can. A dedicated search engine is the only thing left to do, other than moving to a faster server (effort and $$$). I checked what it would take to run Sphinx on VB 3.8. I would have to hack the code based on some loose instructions on the forum that worked for one guy. Obviously there's zero support for any problems I'd hit. My current setup has maybe 6 months of life left in it, performance wise. If I wait six months, a year, what will have changed in the forum software world? VB 4.x will still suck. IPB 3.4 has modest ambitions. XenForo is going nowhere fast. And the free boards are still going to be way behind.
Fair enough. If the status of MySQL 5.6 wasn't still as nebulous as it always is (thus putting all instances of it in the "testing" realm rather than the "production" realm for all but the most brazen gung-ho BOFHs) I'd advise seeing what the new fulltext search there brings for your performance (some have said that -- at least in the forum world -- it'll deprecate the perceived need to mess with sphinx; I make no judgment call myself as I'm holding back personally for the moment). But, not having data on what you're running on and so on, I can only spin moonbeams and make a philosophical case. You seem to be predicating your decision then on improvement of search and the capacity for out-of-the-box support (I add the latter because if it were just the former, attempting the sphinx hack and not having support for it would not have come up in your reply). In that case, IPB is a very solid contender and definitely is a good pick if it isn't going to require too much for your transition. XF is still very much a garage shop operation, regardless of what goes down legally there, and while vB seems to be getting its stride I fear that a corporate memo or two could wreck that pretty fast, which isn't a fear I have with IPB. Any way you slice it, upgrading from vB3 is going to involve a fair amount of work, which increases the more heavily modded you are. If you're convinced that the search situation is irreparable and that going with IPB for their native sphinx support is your magic bullet, then it looks like your choice is obvious and the questions really move on to what you need to do logistically to make it happen. =) I just have to press the "Why 'upgrade'?" line because I've seen too many folks do so simply to keep up with the Joneses (which, if your forum is doing what it was designed to do, why do it? As you pointed out, there's really no great innovation going on in this space, so switching to be innovative is a waste of time/money/effort, but all too many people do that). I'm also an outlier, though, because I run multiple dedicated servers for my "lab" outside of the distributed computing environment that houses our "production" site, and I also have (entirely too much) free time to play. If we end up pushing the edges of what the setup can handle, there's also the funding squirreled away for upgrades and other gizmos. For me, at least, it's more economical to wait and play with the new InnoDB fulltext stuff in 5.6 and other such flights of fancy. You seem to be in the position where your timetable is rapidly shrinking in which to come up with a functional solution, so it looks like platform switch may be the thing for you. There are plenty of positive anecdotes out there for folks who made that switch (both in IPB's forum itself and even in the vB Customer Forum), so barring some other non-starter it really does seem to be what's best for you.
I just did some quick research, and MySQL 5.6's InnoDB fulltext search is supposed to perform similarly to MyISAM fulltext search. Sphinx benchmarks far better than MyISAM fulltext. The other thing that interests me is superior search results, since forum search results are notoriously crap. Now that I think of it, I tried fulltext on my board in it's younger days and it gave clearly worse results than the VB search. IPB currently doesn't support Sphinx's advanced ranking, but that's the kind of thing I could work on or commission.
The issue I have with IPB is that its a resource hog. When I installed the last one, it alerted me that I didn't have the right amount of resources for it and it became very slow after I ignore that and installed it. I use a pretty big dedicated server which can easily handle vbulletin, xenforo, SMF and MyBB without any problems. So I am letting my IPB expire because the other software seems to be more stable on the resources side.
My ipb said something similar. I forget hat it was. But i havent noticed anything too slow as of yet.
also wanted to note, I am using quite a few 3.2 mods on 3.3 and i have no issues with them at all. The resource issues and the slowness i have yet to see though.
What "resources" did it lack? I did a trial install on an old server, and it complained that I'd reduced the PHP memory limit to half of the default size, but nothing else. (VB only used a lot of PHP memory to process complex search results, and I was willing to let the occasional search die). I'd be surprised if it did anything more than check your mysql and php configuration settings. It shouldn't have the permissions to figure out the raw performance of your server (CPU power, physical RAM, disk IO, bandwidth). I'd be surprised if it could even get at the httpd configuration. If it decides your mysql or php resources are insufficient, then I'm not surprised it would run slow. I sped up vBulletin a LOT just by tuning mysql parameters. One tip: something a lot of people, including forum software support guys, don't know is that this type of app works best with a minimal mysql query cache. More cache is not better because it makes cache invalidates more expensive, and a frequently updated forum invalidates the cache a lot. You also want to cache only small queries, because big queries on a forum are basically never repeated and they just pollute the cache. The only way to get the right numbers for your forum is to run it in a production environment, then keep reducing the query cache size and cache limit as long as you're still getting a decent number of hits. When I worry about IPB performance, I'm really interested in the feedback of people who've run big boards and done at least that level of tuning for both VB and IPB.
For those wondering. IP.Board's requirements are thus: Minimum Recommended PHP Memory Limit of 128M. This is so intensive operations can be performed at Install and Upgrade time (Language Caching, Skin Caching, so on and so forth). I've seen clients run at 64M, however if you run into memory limit issues, we will typically ask you to try and raise that to our recommended value when the aforementioned actions are performed. PHP Version 5.2 or higher. 5.3 is recommended. We are fixing PHP 5.4 issues as they come in. We also require the GD2, SPL, and DOM XML Extensions. Native Json support is also recommended, though not required as we include the JSON PEAR Library. MySQL 4.1 or higher, with MySQL 5 being the recommended version, though I personally recommend 5.1 or higher. IP.Nexus requires either Zend Optimizer (PHP 5.2) or Zend Guard (PHP 5.3) or the Ioncube Loaders. I recommend Ioncube as it has proven to be more stable overall. There are a few other recommendations I can make. For example - MySQL wait_timeout is a big one that comes up a lot. Some hosts / DBA's appear to be setting this to extremely low values which can cause issues when running intensive processes such as the Template Merge Center, because MySQL Times out before the process completes. Another big one that often comes up are file uploads. Clients attempting to upload extremely large files over PHP (I'm talking in the 500 MB to 1 GB range), which can often time out if PHP / the server software is not configured properly to handle such large uploads. And, often times our larger clients start seeing MySQL Locking due to searches - for this we have Sphinx support built in to our software offload searches from the MySQL Server.
Where has Xenforo been the last six months? With development? I can't remember when the last update was truly made on where Xenforo was headed. Oh that's right they've spending so much time and money in court fighting their legal issues. So let me ask you this. If vBulletin wins their legal battle, where does that leave Xenforo? Dead man walking. Now I want to add, I'm currently using Xenforo, love it, but the slow progress of Xenforo is troubling. Now official chat for Xenforo. Now mobile skin for Xenforo, at least not now. Tons and tons of bugs in the current build. All of this has forced me to strongly consider switching to a tried and true software such as IPB.
Oh look! Someone else who thinks there needs to be updates every two weeks. And if everyone who bought XF truly thought IB would win the suit, do you think we would have purchased a license?
There hasn't been a true update for at least six months. So yeah, way to keep your clients in the loop. So you didn't answer my questions. Because you can't that's why. Doesn't matter when or why you bought a license.
I just moved my VB 3.8 forum to a new server similar to yours (MySQL 5.5, PHP 5.4, Apache 2.4) and suddenly it has a nasty problem. Any post containing high ASCII text cannot be quoted, edited, or previewed. Posts tend to include high ASCII text whenever they're pasted from a news web site, because the right-leaning apostrophe character is commonly used. I'm sure there is some way to fix this but... nothing on the internet, no support. It's not as if IPB is perfect. I haven't even been able to complete the install on my new server yet - but I've put in a support ticket and someone's paid to deal with it.
Oh dear god, not the XenForo Update dead horse... we already have like five other topics that one has been flagellated ad nauseam in the past few months, perhaps you guys can move the whole "somebody's wrong on the internet, I must correct them!" impulse there? As for your issue, n0mDePlume, I'll have to slap around my test ports and see if I at all run into the same issue. As I say whenever the switch question comes up, there are different priorities for different admin, and having a strong support base going forward appears to be one of yours, in which case you can definitely do much worse than to hitch your wagon to IPB. I've just seen far too many admins in recent years "chasing the shiny", which is why I always give the "what are you looking for?" spiel; many admins switch platforms thinking it'll fix the structural issues their community may have. For me, it's not a big huge deal: if I can end up replicating the problem you're having, I have the spare time and technical frame of reference to deal with it. For you, you apparently are running something far too active and big to take such chances with (and you don't have the time in your day/resources lying around to do things like play "let's run a test port and try all this"). That's a-okay: you should be looking at running something like IPB instead in that case. Note as I check this myself: not currently able to duplicate as I spam UTF characters, but that means little; my current test port's vB 3.7.2, and it was installed and configured from the getgo in the PHP 5.4/MySQL 5.5 environment. My production server has everything including usernames -- to my chagrin when using the awards system -- with UTF stuff sprinkled through it all, but I've seen no reason to go past 5.3 on production and I don't feel like spending the time doing a 2 million post import to test to hammer things when most cloud services -- which is what we run for production -- and such are just barely beginning PHP 5.3 support, let alone considering 5.4. At the pace of current advancement, I have a few years to play before I have to even consider this an issue in production.
You really should check out IPB. I have moved my largest forum that was XF to IPB and the fact that IPb has had quite a few updates out in just over a month of me using it makes me feel more comfortable with them. You don't HAVE to constantly update everytime they release something however it does give you confidence that XF is not giving to alot of it's customers. I still have XF license but I've been spoiled by the development speed and just overall customer service of IPB that Xenforo is looking more and more...amateurish to me by each day. I still think the software is great but the first thing one of my members said when we switched over to ipb was...THANK GOD THERE is a mobile skin
