Moving to a new forum software - Suggestion needed

After using miniBB for over 6 years, I think it's time to move on to a new forum software. miniBB has served me well but, to keep abreast with latest changes and user experience in mind, I have decided to move over to Xenforo. I had been contemplating it for a while and I think it's the time now to make the transition.

Before making the transition I need your inputs and your support. You see, I have two options:

1. Move the present forum to a read only location and install a fresh copy of new forum software. For example url:
http://www.work-at-home-forum.com/general-3/feel-like-giving-up-22579.html will move to:
http://www.work-at-home-forum.com/archive/general-3/feel-like-giving-up-22579.html

This way, there won't be any loss of visitors as visitors to old forum pages will simply be redirected to archive. Member signature, etc. in the old forums will be intact.

However, members will have to sign up again to the new forum and start all over.

2. The second option would involve a forum migration service to migrate existing forum data to new forum software. The biggest downside to this option is that visitors to old forum pages will be shown 404 error., resulting in 1000s of dead pages. Search engines will have to completely re-index the new forum and may also penalize. Old links to forum pages will not work.

Seeing the pros and cons, I'm favoring the first option. I need your inputs and any others suggestions you may have.

Yours truly,

Vishal

 

Thanks Hermas!

I understand your concern Jimmy. The migration will not take care of old urls because of the way new forum software creates urls. The url structure is entirely different, so it's not possible to match them.

In the first option, I can create conditional 301 redirects like:

RewriteRule /general-3/(.+?)\.html /archive/general-3/$1.html [R=301,L]

In the above example, all pages under "General" category will be redirected to the exact "archive" url.

Whereas in the second case, this is not possible as I will have to manually create a redirect line from old url to new forum url for thousands of pages.

Yes, re-registration will cause frustration but I feel that's not a very big issue.

The old pages will continue to receive visitors until they have the authority. So no work will go wasted.

 

Just2EZ: That's the part I don't understand but it seems to be a common problem.
It just doesn't make sense to me why they couldn't be a match.
Different forum software will have different way of generating urls. Installing SEO mods/addons will further complicate things. Before installing SEO adon in this forum, URLS were something like:
http://www.work-at-home-forum.com/2_1234.html

After installing SEO addon, they changed to something like:
http://www.work-at-home-forum.com/general-3/topic_name-topic_ID.html

Xenforo might create urls like:

http://www.work-at-home-forum.com/general/topic_name.topic_ID/

Again "topic_name" in the URL created by miniBB will be different from "topic_name" created by Xenforo because miniBB substitutes "special characters" in the topic name with "hyphens". Also, the "topic_name" is shortened to 70 characters, which may not be the case with Xenforo.

If there was no SEO mod installed here and if Xenforo did not use topic names in urls, then it would have been possible to match urls using topic IDs.

Just2EZ: p.s. What are you doing up at this hour?
It was around 9.00 pm here when I made the last post

 

Just2EZ: Not used to seeing you on here in the AM (Arizona time).


Just2EZ: Lost a lot of rank moving a blog to a different platform years ago.
That's what might happen here too if I move all content to Xenforo. The best option therefore is to archive the present content and get as much juice from it as possible using 301 redirects. If you don't provide 301 redirects then search engines are likely to de-index all the content.

Actually the idea of archiving content didn't occur to me previously and I was literally losing sleep over as to how to best achieve the migration. Then I came across this report which listed different options while migrating. There I discovered the archiving option.

I'm sure the new platform will significantly improve the user experience here.

 

Good news! I think I can go ahead with Option 1 without any adverse side effects. The Xenforo support team told me that they can setup redirects from old to new urls. That's a great relief for me. Will post the upgrade schedule shortly.

 

Vishal P. Rao: Good news! I think I can go ahead with Option 1 without any adverse side effects. The Xenforo support team told me that they can setup redirects from old to new urls. That's a great relief for me. Will post the upgrade schedule shortly.
Oops! I actually meant I could go ahead with option 2.