We’ve successfully migrated our community ( techenclave.com ) from XenForo to Discourse. Total Posts: 2.5 million Total Users: 79K (active and banned) Total Private Messages: 0.7 million It is a 20 year old community so it has seen its fair share of migrations from Proboards, Vbulletin, IPB, Xenfo…

Thanks for sharing! A lot of stuff on the list that I identified as action items for an ongoing SMF to Discourse migration project :slightly_smiling_face: Is your customized importer code available to the public? I would especially be interested in how you handled the two-pass import to ensure corr…

[image] GitHub - rahul-rakesh/xenforo-migration-scripts Contribute to rahul-rakesh/xenforo-migration-scripts development by creating an account on GitHub. You can refer to the import scripts I used. The file you want to see is this: xenforo_import_enh…

[image] schneeland: the two-pass import to ensure correct new links. The reason we had to do two pass was because over time invariably an old topic will get merged into a new topic. But the posts will have the old ID and will get picked up first. With no corresponding topic imported by then, …

Thanks a lot! Will take a look. Also, I appreciate the additional comment about the thoughts behind this. That is a problem we luckily didn’t encounter. The main reason I was thinking about a two-pass import is that the hyperlinks in quotes still have the old URL - and while permalinks should also …

Wow! Congrats! And thank you for sharing. [image] SubStrider: A large section of users were not happy after the migration. It is expected, yeah. The way that you handle their feedback now is crucial. Address their comments, make sure they feel heard, and highlight the improvements and new fe…

After four failed attempts with the stock importer, your version worked beautifully.

[image] SubStrider: Nevertheless, will share a summary of the feedback later in this topic, there might be some food for thought to feed into the future of discourse. Sharing this summary as promised. Used Gemini 2.5 Pro to summarize all feedback collected in the last 3 months. I would say t…

[image] SubStrider: I wish there was a paid themes marketplace on Discourse like on other forum platforms. Why not Marketplace ? Though the result is usually private.

[image] SubStrider: Poor Content Discovery: Users miss the old categories page, which provided a clear, hierarchical overview of the forum’s structure and latest activity within sections. The new layout is seen as a “mishmash.” For these users, you might want to consider explicitly calling ou…

With a themes marketplace the cost is divided between multiple buyers. The theme creator also has incentive to create many themes.

Migrated from XenForo to Discourse: Overview of the Migration

Support Migration

SubStrider July 16, 2025, 8:04am 3

You can refer to the import scripts I used. The file you want to see is this:
xenforo_import_enhanced.rb

Topic		Replies	Views
Questions About Migrating From Xenforo Self-hosting	22	6279	November 21, 2016
Discourse for me... 6 weeks in Praise	11	3869	December 16, 2015
Migrate a XenForo forum to Discourse Sysadmins how-to	96	20685	February 25, 2025
Xenforo 2.3 Migration Migration xenforo	12	968	December 30, 2024
I have a few questions before migrate from Xenforo 2.x to Discourse Migration xenforo	8	1803	May 15, 2020

Migrated from XenForo to Discourse: Overview of the Migration

Related topics