By socceronly on

I am curious about transferring a forum to Drupal. The current forum does not use a lot of fancy features and the work done by Michelle and others on the forum improvements are fantastic.

I know this forum is big, but it is run by the gods of Drupal themselves!

I would probably hire someone to do the transfer into D6.

I have a dedicated server it would run on. Those posts are accumulated over a long time. Not sure how many posts a day we are getting but it could be a couple of hundred, when busy as many as a thousand.

I just wonder if this is something people would recommend doing at all, speaking in a general sense.

Any thoughts?

Comments

mallory99’s picture

mallory99 commented

It's definitely worth doing. Check out the Webmaster Forums for an example of a similar migration with a huge forum. The site admin developed the vbtodrupal module which will make the transfer much simpler if you've also been using VBulletin. Bear in mind, the WF forums are all the more impressive since they were done using drupal 5 before the advanced forum burst onto the scene.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Drupal can handle pretty large forums, in general. There are a couple of queries that are sticky points, though, on the main forum page. You might want to look into the core issues about them to see if there are any tips for optomising them.

Another thing to consider is if you want to use nodes for "comments" as well. Advanced Forum 2.x now has support for Nodecomment 2, which opens up all the capabilities of nodes to your forum replies. It's not quite ready for production use, especially on a very large and active forum, but I thought I'd throw it out there as something to think about. While you can convert comments to nodes to use with Nodecomment, it would likely be easier to just do the conversion once from your existing forum.

Michelle

socceronly’s picture

socceronly commented

I am just playing with the Drupal forum module right now.

Installing AdvF too!

Currently the forum is using snitz on a windows server. I re did the front end with Drupal, but the forum is still running on the old server.

I am excited about getting it all under one roof.

It is interesting, the people in the forum don't want any fancy forum features, they seem to find them irritating. Which I can appreciate when sometimes you have an animated avatar, animated sig.... ect...

Thanks! I am going to have a go at it.

I was just curious if there was some unspoken caveat that would cause a permanent solar eclipse and all life on the planet to die as a result of attempting this.

:)

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Well, if they don't want any features, you might be able to just use the core forum. That will get you a forum like we have here on drupal.org. The point of AF is to add features that folks are used to from other forum software. :)

Shouldn't be anything catastrophic. Just might be a bit slower than you're used to because Drupal really isn't optomized to be a forum like vBulletin is.

Michelle

WhiplashInfo’s picture

WhiplashInfo commented

How did it went for you, socceronly?

Can you please update me on your experience migrating Snitz to Drupal Forum?
I'm in the process doing this migration from Snitz Forums to Drupal myself.

Tomas