Technology Upgrades Progress

[danp]

I have just deployed the first test change that will determine whether or not my plan of attack to remove vBSEO (a vBulletin 3.X plugin that is preventing us from upgrading to vBulletin 4.X) will work.

So far it appears it will.

The unfortunate thing about this plugin is that it is responsible for all of the URLs generated on the forum, if I simply remove it, all links to the site will break, whether from Google, other websites, or within the forum itself.

This would obviously be really bad.

At this point I believe I have identified every possible URL pattern vBSEO uses and the non-vBSEO equivalent of that URL pattern. I have written automated unit testing to verify that the URLs are doing what they are supposed to be doing, and one by one I will be disabling the vBSEO rewrites, and deploying redirect rules that should preserve the old URLs keeping everything from breaking.

If all goes as planned, once I am done setting up all the redirects, we should be able to remove the vBSEO plugin and start the next step: vBulletin 4.

I am starting with disabling the least important URLs first (tags, archives, etc.) and will be implementing the rewrites for the most important URLs (forums, threads, etc.) at the last. This way I have plenty of time to mess something up that is unimportant

The main downside of removing vBSEO is that we'll probably take a little hit in the Search Engine Optimization area, but at this point our website is well-enough established as a leader that I do not think it will be too bad. It will certainly be worth the new functionality we'll get with vBulletin 4.

Thanks everyone for your patience.

[danp]

Another URL rewrite has been deployed for forum announcements. This should only affect the Classifieds and appears to have worked properly.

[danp]

Two more deployments were done late this evening/early this morning to fix URLs for the member list and user avatars.

If anyone notices and broken user avatars, please let me know by posting here.

[danp]

I have just deployed an update to prepare the URLs for member profiles once vBSEO is removed. This is the first change regarding some of the more important URLs on the site.

Please let me know if you see any broken links to people's profiles.

[danp]

One of the last URL fixes has been deployed reverting both forum URLs and thread URLs to the original vBulletin format. This gets us very close to being able to remove the vBSEO plugin and preparing for a vBulletin 4 upgrade.

If you see any broken links to forums or threads that result in a "Page not found" message please reply with the URL to tried to access so I can investigate a fix.

Thanks everyone!

[danp]

Removed the first vBSEO plugin which generated XML sitemaps for us. There should be no noticeable change anyone using the forum should notice.

[danp]

I have now disabled the vBSEO plugin by software flag which will allow us to re-enable it if I find out anything has broken, but it looks good so far.

The next step will be to completely remove the plugin after I verify that everything is more-or-less working properly with it disabled.

If anyone sees anything really broken happening, please let me know in this thread.

Test link: http://forum.pafoa.org/showthread.php?p=3054944

[danp]

And lo, the beast named vBSEO hath been slain.

So, the malware warning problem we had a few months ago that necessitated all the work I've been doing was the fault of a plugin we've used for many years called vBSEO which helped PAFOA gain better search engine rankings.

I am happy to announce that this plugin has now been completely removed from the site.

As far as I can tell I have been able to make the impact of the removal completely unnoticeable to you all, but please let me know if you see any problems related to pages returning "Page Not Found" errors.

The next major step for us is upgrading to vBulletin 4, but there is one last plugin we have that is vB3 only that I have to look into. If all goes well we will upgrade to vB4 in the coming week.

Thanks to everyone for your patience!

[danp]

After attempting a test upgrade from vBulletin 3.8 to vBulletin 4.X, I've found out that due to the size of our forum, the upgrade process may take an entire day (or even more)

I'm in contact with the folks who make vBulletin to see if there is anything we can do to speed this up, but as of now we may need to take the forum offline for 24-48 hours in order to accomplish the upgrade which is not fun.

I'll keep this thread up-to-date as I know more.

[streaker69]

After attempting a test upgrade from vBulletin 3.8 to vBulletin 4.X, I've found out that due to the size of our forum, the upgrade process may take an entire day (or even more)

I'm in contact with the folks who make vBulletin to see if there is anything we can do to speed this up, but as of now we may need to take the forum offline for 24-48 hours in order to accomplish the upgrade which is not fun.

I'll keep this thread up-to-date as I know more.

Do you want me to start reducing the size? I can delete unnecessary threads and users.