Questions about migrating from vbulletin

[Islander (Sid)]

We are looking for migrating our current forum on vbulletin to Discourse and have few questions if someone someone can answer.

1. How easy it is to migrate from vbulletin?
2. Can we have the structure of forums or sections underneath which our users will create multiple threads?
3. Can we have chat feature for users?
4. How about audio chat?

Any help is appreciated as we are close to making a decision on it. Thanks.

[itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma)]

Hi @Islander welcome to Discourse meta, I’ll try to answer your questions

@Islander

How easy it is to migrate from vbulletin?

It’s not easy per se but it is a very straightforward process given that You’re comfortable with SSH, Databases and Docker.

@Islander

Can we have the structure of forums or sections underneath which our users will create multiple threads?

Discourse has Supported for Nested categories one level deep. Topics can be created in the parent or sub category depending upon the permissions of the category.

@Islander

Can we have chat feature for users?

There is a 3rd Party plugin known as Babble, this can be helpful for You.

Babble Chat

Please note that this plugin is no longer maintained and will likely cause problems in its current state: Babble is an simple, lightweight chat plugin for Discourse. It re-skins the existing topic view into a sidebar, allowing for quick conversations in your forum. Note the tag above - Babble has been tagged a “broken-plugin.” [48%20AM] Check out the demo site to see it in action, or view (and contribute to!) the code on Github. If you’d like to help translate Babble to your lan…

@Islander

How about audio chat?

Not natively supported in Discourse but You are free to make a plugin to do that.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@Islander

How easy it is to migrate from vbulletin

It depends. I’ve done several vBulletin imports. It’s surprising how different they have all been. It may be that the script will work “out of the box” or it might need customization, depending on how perfect you need things to be, what Add-ons you have used, and any quirks your community might have in how they have used it. Imports pay my mortgage, you can check out Redirecting… which outlines issues you’ll need to consider whether you do it yourself or get someone to do it for you.