Simple Machines Forum
 

Anyone have any experience with or know of someone that has moved all their users from Simple Machines Forum (http://www.simplemachines.org) to vB?

I am looking to attempt to do it, but I need someone to point me in the right direction.

I would be moving roughly 2,300 people and about 10k posts.

I am running vB 3.5 and the SMF version is 1.03.

Thanks ahead of time.

No one has ever heard of anyone moving from Simple Machines to vB?

Never heard of it. Try asking at vB.com and see if they can write an IMPEX for it.

ImpEx does support SMF.

petreska never heard of SMF??? :eek: :eek:
It's the 2nd most popular free forum software after phpBB!

Rapidly becoming the most important - phpBB has a lot of users, mainly through inertia and people simply not being skilled enough to convert their existing forums.

For the forseeable future, vb will reamin the script of choice for large, established forums but, the way I see things going, SMF is going to be the best choice for starting off or field-testing a forum.

To be honest, the vast majority of forums out there simply don't have enough users to justify vb.

I think phpBB continues to be so popular because anyone that watns to make a forum doesn't have another choice cuase it's the only one he knows. Personally I think that phpBB SUCKS. It lacks many important features and needs to be hacked to death to have the features that most forum s/w have by default. When we started our forums we searched a lot and decided to go with SMF (I wouldn't suggest paid software for starting forums!) as it had most of the features we wanted from a free forum and it felt safer than phpBB that gets hacked all the time from script kiddies.
It's funny though, although I love vBulletin I still miss some SMF features...

I'm doing this move right now and it's working perfectly.

Actually.. I'm running 2 boards right now.. one in testing/development for the official move.. I think it's the 5th time that I "reinstall" my vBulletin (erasing the database) to make sure the official move will be AS SMOOTH AS POSSIBLE..

I just found a hack that let me import the passwords from SMF.. this will save me a BIG headache at the time of the official move.

If you need any help, just ask me. I'll do my best to share my experience with you.

FYI, phpBB being brought up, SMF is becoming the #1 forum now, phpBB is dropping due to the resignation of 3 or 4, can't remember how many, developers, leaving only 1 and now he is near the end as he has stated in a blog. Check http://area51.phpbb.com for information if you wish.

All in all, moves from any board to vB is always smooth and easy going.