I always had it the back of my mind to open another programming forum.

Most of my sites are tech sites with the exception of a couple off topic forums. I just never could find the time needed to dedicate myself to nurturing a new programming community. You really need to be able answer the questions in the early stages and since I haven’t daddled in any code other than C and PHP over the last few years I didn’t want to undertake something I had not messed with since Visual Studio 2003 and since I sold the .Net forum.

I started to think more seriously about creating the new Microsoft .Net Forums after I remembered that I created the original .Net forum to not only replace the Visual Basic forum, Visual Basic was nearing end of life, but, also to learn .Net. First I decided to make the forum a part of Extreme VB and .Net which I transitioned to .Net a couple years back. I created the forum and the structure as a subdomain of Extreme VB and .Net.

I then went about consolidating some of my communities to streamline my network and had more or less forgot about the new forum. I closed it down because during my absence spammers had their way with it. I also didn’t like the fact that it was on a subdomain and not on it’s own. I had my eye on a couple domains and when the one that was my first choice became I available I bought it as soon as it appeared in my available list.

I used my last remaining vBulletin license and opened up the community. I did have an extra IPB license and I was going to use it, but, I have another community that is ready for conversion and it was already dedicated for it. Microsoft .Net Programming Forums will eventually be converted to IPB.

Without further ado I’d like to introduce everyone to Microsoft .Net Forums a community for .Net programmers to gather and share ideas and solve each others .Net programming problems. We can all learn together at Microsoft .Net Forums.

I’m 95% certain I can get a vb+vbseo board to out rank an IPB forum with the same content & links.

I was going to write an article about this very topic. I had gathered the data and taken screenshots to do this and until Brandon posted on Twitter I didn’t have the urge. I have converted 3 of my communities to IPB from vBulletin. The sites all had vbSEO installed. I gathered the data from  Computer Help Forums from the last week I had vBulletin with vbSEO installed and then each week after the conversion to IPB. What I did was look at stats for each week after after I converted. Initially pageviews dropped, but, site visits and visitors stayed constant. Then about 2 weeks  in I noticed an increase in pageviews, visits and visitors. I also noticed that the search engines seemed to visit more often.

First a little information about the before and after. I had vBuletin installed with vbSEO. I used the vbSEO replacement feature which adds the first x words from each post to the header. I used the custom meta tags for each page and keyword thread titles.

When I converted to IPB I set up htaccess friendly url’s. I redirected the old vbSEO url’s to the default vBulletin url’s. Then used the tools IPB gives you to redirect the old url’s to the new IPB search engine friendly url’s. I have done nothing extra to the stock install of IPB to make it more SE friendly. The site doesn’t even have meta tags. I don’t know if adding them would help, but, it sure hasn’t hurt as the stats below will tell you.

Take a look at the last week I had vBulletin installed with vbSEO.

Now look at the stats from the site 2 weeks after converting to IPB.

IPB one week stats

As you can see since the switch from vBulletin with vbSEO to IPB with no extra SEO being done the site gets more traffic, more visitors and more pageviews.

Now lets look at the SE activity on the site. One would expect this to increase anyway since the search engines had to re-index all the content. That is why I went a little farther ahead with this data. I wanted to let things calm down and in order to do that I waited until a month passed.

Search engine activity from the last week vBulletin and vbSEO were installed.

Now lets look at the first week a month after the install of IPB.

As you can see the search engines seem to like the site. They visit with more frequency.

Clearly a stock install of IPB with no special SEO done to it will not hurt your site in the search engines. In fact in my case the results with a stock IPB install performed better than the install of vBulletin with vbSEO.

So getting back to Brandon’s tweet. I would bet that anything that he can do with vbSEO wouldn’t matter at all. An equal IPB forum with same content would perform as well or better. That’s my opinion anyway.

Now on to the steps I took to increase the performance of my PHP websites running on Windows 2008 and Windows 2003 with IIS. At the end of the article I’ll supply links to the downloads I used.

My previous configuration had PHP 5.2.3 running in ISAPI mode with thread safe binaries. There were no options for non-thread safe binaries at the time. I think they first became available with 5.3.0 and in later versions of the 5.2 branch. With 5.3.0 the ISAPI extension is deprecated so you have no choice but to use CGI. CGI by itself is much slower than ISAPI and there are no accelerators such as xcache that will work it. I’m not going to get into the difference between thread safe and non-thread safe in PHP. Instead I’ll direct to a blog post on IIS.net which give you a brief description of the 2. View it here.

On my Windows 2003 servers I upgraded PHP to 5.2.12 non thread safe. I changed all the sites so that they used the CGI binary. There is no ISAPI filter for IIS in the NTS downloads. After I had PHP configured with the extensions I needed to be loaded, you’ll need the NTS extensions since thread safe extensions will not work, I turned IIS back online and recycled the app pools for each site. As expected the site was slower with this configuration and loads on the server increased.

The next step was to download the FastCGI wrapper. I downloaded it and installed it on the server. I then set up the fast cgi ini to use the PHP cgi binary and set the basic configuration. Once that was done I set each site to use the fast cgi binary to serve pages. I then recycled the app pools again. I checked the site again and the speed of each site was better than it had ever been with ISAPI and xcache. The load on the server was also lower than it had ever been. After the site ran all night I noticed I was getting some timeouts on certain scripts. I was able to correct that by tweaking the fast cgi ini. For one I had to make sure the timeout for script execution was the same as it is in php.ini. I also added a few other changes that seem to have increased performance even more that the default install.

My final fast cgi ini looks like this:

[Types]
php=PHP

[PHP]
ExePath=C:\Inetpub\php-5.2.12-nts\php-cgi.exe
InstanceMaxRequests=10000
EnvironmentVars=PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS:10000
MaxInstances=300
IdleTimeout=300
ActivityTimeout=300
RequestTimeout=300
QueueLength=2000

The only downside to using fast cgi is none of the opcode caches like xcache work with it. While fast cgi by itself gave the server a serious speed improvement over ISAPI I had got used to having xcache installed. I then found a post about an opcode cache built specifiably for Windows Server running fast cgi. It’s called wincache. I downloaded it and installed it. To my surprise page load times decreased again and server load was next to nothing.

For Windows 2003 servers you can’t go wrong with NTS binaries with fast cgi and wincache.

Now that I had my Windows 2003 servers done I went on to the Windows 2008 Servers. This was much easier since the fast cgi wrapper is already the way you run php on Windows 2008. I had been running thread safe versions of PHP so when I upgraded PHP I went to 5.3.1 NTS using the vc9 build. I noticed a slight speed increase. Not as much as I did on the Windows 2003 servers, but, an increase none the less.

I then installed wincache. After 24 hours I now see a marked performance increase on the Windows 2008 servers.

So if you want to give your Windows Servers a shot in the arm switch to PHP non thread safe with fast cgi and wincache. You’ll be glad you did.

Here are the links to the downloads you’ll need.

Fast CGI wrapper for IIS 6
wincache download page

I am starting this to document the steps I take so it can serve as a tutorial for others that are going to switch from vBulletin to IPB. The vBulletin version running is 3.8.4. The version of IPB that will be installed will be 3.0.5. I will also install IP.Downloads, IP.Gallery, IP.Blog and IP.Content.

Watch this post to follow the progress of this vBulletin to IPB conversion. Each step and procedure as well as post conversion configuration will be outlined so that anyone that  wants to convert from vBulletin to IPB will have a set of procedures to follow.

Read on to see the steps I took to convert Computer Help Forums from vbulletin to IPB.

Preparing for the Import:

I made sure I created backups of the vbulletin database and vbulletin files. This would make it easy for me to rollback to vbulletin in case something didn’t go well with the conversion. After the backups were uploaded to the backup server I was ready to begin. I shut the site down and put up a temp index page letting users know what was going on and an estimate of how long it would take.

Removing vBulletin and installing IPB:

Once the site was shutdown I deleted all the vbulletin files in the sites directory. I then uploaded all the IPB files, edited the config file and started the installer. Since I was doing a conversion of a blog and gallery I also upload all those files. I then started the installer. I selected all the addons to also be installed as well as the portal and chat. The install went well. I then copied smilies, custom avatars, custom profile pics and my old vbulletin attachment dir to the new IPB install. I’m now ready to start the conversion.

The conversion:

The first thing I did was configure the site by editing all the site settings. Then I uploaded the converters and activated the app in the admincp. When you start the converter you’ll be given options for each app you have installed. In my case I had options to import forum, blog and gallery.

I started the converter and I chose the vbulletin conversion scripts to do the forum first. I went along with each step and when it was time to import smileys I used the path to the vbulletin dir that I added to the root after the IPB install. The whole process is pretty much straight forward and if you get any errors the script will let you know and then you can decide if you want to do that step again. If you do make sure you check the checkbox to clear the data first.

A couple things to do during the conversion.

1. When you are importing usergroups make sure you create new usergroups and don’t associate with IPB permissions. It’s a little more work after the conversion to set up permissions or move users into IPB groups, but, makes things easier in the long run.
2. Make sure you set the correct paths to the avatars and profile pics that you copied over from your vbulletin install when you import members.
3. After the forum conversion set the permissions before you proceed to the post import. You get a link that will allow you to that before you continue.

The forum conversion took a little over 2 hours. This was with editing the forum permissions and editing the new permissions sets to be used for the usergroups I imported. I removed the vbulletin registered users group and moved all the users into the IPB member group. Same for banned users. I setup the super mod group and permissions to mirror what I had with vbulletin and moved the imported mod group users into the IPB mod group and reassigned forum permissions for the moderators. I then rebuild all the counters and the cache.

The end result and thoughts:

Once the forum import was done and permissions where in place I opened the forum for the staff members only.

I then started the blog and gallery conversions. Nothing earth shattering happened during the conversion. Just make sure you move you vbulletin albums dir to the IPB dir. Everything went  well without errors. Once I had permissions setup on the gallery and blogs I updated counters, = and ran the picture tool to convert vbulletin .picture to images for IP.Gallery. I then rebuilt thumbnails and albums and opened the blog and gallery.

A few minor tweaks had to be done the first few days, but, now 2 weeks later, everything is running smoothly and the users like the new software. Adnins are getting used to the new admincp and I have heard from more than one of them that things are much easier once you get used to where everything is.

Moderators had a problem at first with deleting posts. We used soft delete instead of actually deleting or moving posts to the recycle bin. This my my fault because I don’t like to actually remove anything. I like to keep spam for reference in the recycle bin or have it soft deleted. Once I explained how the trash can featured worked they seem to like it better.

During the first run PM’s didn’t convert correctly. This was not a fault of the IPB converter. It is a problem with the way deleted users are treated in vbulletin. When you delete a user the PM’s associated with the user don’t get removed. If you deleted users in vbulletin chances are you’ll get errors importing PM’s.

The gallery import failed on the first run. Couldn’t find the path to the albums. I never was given a place to add the path so of course it failed. When I re-ran it I was given a place to add the path and once I did it went without a problem.

The blog import worked, but, each blog was given the userid for name instead of  the username. I just told my users to rename the blog.

All in all I am very happy with IPB. This is the third site I have converted and was the most complicated because I was also doing the gallery and blog. It all went well and took much less time than I though it would. My users like IPB.  My staff like IPB and I love IPB.

I am doing some rearranging of my sites and will have 3 more conversions to do over the course of this year. My goal is to be vbulletin free by the end of 2010.

The install on of vBulletin 4 Gold went well. The vBulletin CMS part did give me an out of memory error. More on that later. Once we got past that everything looked good and seemed to work well. Read on to get to the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good:

The install of vBulletin 4 Gold went smooth except for the out of memory error while the vBulletin CMS was being installed. That was fixed by upping the memory in php.ini from 128M to 256M. The server has 8Gigs installed so it had much more to allocate if needed. After the install I promoted a few posts in the resources section to articles. This went well. I added a couple extra forums and did a few test posts. All is still good. Everything seemed to work and work well. Then it was time to get into the nuts and bolts of  vBulletin 4 and here comes the bad.

The Bad:

I turned the forum into debug mode. What a shock when I saw the vBulletin CMS main page used 202 queries. I refreshed the page so the cache would kick in. Query count was now 197. Refreshed again count went back to 202. I removed one column. No change. I cut the amount of articles to show. Query count down to 187. Refresh the page back to 202. I removed the widgets. No change. Refresh the page down to 178. Add one widget. Back up to 200. I don’t know what is causing this. I do know if it is left like this the vBulletin CMS will be useless unless it is installed on a dedicated server.

I then went about changing the style of the forum. I downloaded the docs that were posted on vBulletins site. I created a new style and went to work on it. I change the background and save changes. Nothing happens. I change a few more things. Nothing happens. Everything is still default. I head over to vBulletin’s site. In the bugs and suggestions forum there is a number of posts with the same problems as me. It seems the stylevar editor does not work as it should. A member who saw my post sent me a PM telling me how to work around the issue. Thanks much for that if you happen to read this.

The Ugly:

Well lets start with the out of memory error. There is no way that upgrading to vBulletin 4 Suite on a small site should throw up out of memory errors. This is unacceptable. If you try to install this on a VPS you’re basically screwed unless you host is willing to up the allocated memory for php.

Now on to the sitemaps a core new feature that was touted throughout the discussions at vBulletin. They do not work. Sure they are created fine. Submit one to Google and you’ll see that they throw an error in webmaster tools. The error says that the sitemap file is empty. Rebuild it, resubmit it and the error returns shortly after Google redownloads it.

The stylewar editor should work without any work arounds. This was another highly touted feature of vBulletin 4. It does not work out of the box.

Search engine friendly URLs another feature that is supposed to make vBulletin 4 the best. Sure they work just try finding the docs that explain how to use the .htaccess method. You won’t because, surprise, vBulletin 4 was released without any docs. You have to visit vBulletin’s site and look in the vBulletin 4 Beta forum to find your answer.

That brings me the last ugly part. In the admincp the help files for these new features don’t exist. Don’t believe me? Go into the vBulletin 4 admincp, open the stylevar editor, pick any stylevar and select the help icon. You get an empty page.

How Internet Brands can release vBulletin 4 as gold is beyond me. They broke just about every unwritten rule that developers follow. The beta process was a joke. I was a supporter of the process when it was first announced. Closed betas to select testers always works better than open betas if the beta is done correctly. The vBulletin 4 beta was a mess.

Then they release vBuletin 4 Gold without help files or updated docs. vBulletin 4 as it stands now is at best beta quality. It should have never been released as gold. A visit to the vBulletin 4 forums at vBulletin’s site will tell you that.

I did download the vBulletin suite and I did install it using a copy of one of my sites. The rush to get it out the door to stop the exodus of customers to IPB has show how unfinished this beta is. Sure it is called a beta, but, in reality it at best alpha quality. The CMS does not even work on Windows Server if you use IIS. Here are a few bugs I have found and yes I did have the courtesy to post them in the bug tracker or confirm ones that other posted.

Lets start with the CMS. Keep in mind that these are specific to my setup which is Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with IIS 7 and fastcgi.

All links to the content have a \ in the url so the link looks like content.php/\?keyworded-title. When you click the link it obviously goes nowhere.

Add on top of that all links begin with https://. A person posted a fix for this which didn’t work for me. I instead removed a whole section of code to get that problem solved. I can’t get the other tracked down.

If you delete all the content that is inserted when you install it magically reappears even though it shows as gone in the admincp. I haven’t looked into this one since the CMS is useless because of the other issues.

Now the forum.

Search engine friendly URL’s don’t work. All links go to 404.  Again this is specific to Windows/IIS server. I was able to fix this one by removing a block of code from a file and inserting

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL'];

in class_core.php. This only works if you have Helicon Isapi rewrite installed. Windows server don’t pass the variable REQUEST_URI.  This is an easy enough problem to fix if the programmers know where the mistake is.

Hint:  function fetch_scriptpath_raw and function fetch_basepath in class_core.php.

The forum itself runs like 3.8.4, but then again it really is 3.8.4 with a new style and templating system. The blog also runs well. There is nothing real earth shattering with vBulletin 4. The CMS might have been the thing to turn vBulletin around, but, instead it is buggy and not even close to being ready for release.

I feel the problem was the testing process. I was a supporter when it was first announced that the aplha and beta phase would be a closed test with a select group of testers. Unfortunately after IB forgot to add testers from all possible server platforms and OS’s and this has left those of us that run Windows with a garbage product.

Look for my suite license to go up for sale soon. Now that I see what is offered I’ll happily stick with IP.Content and IPB.

My original plan was to test vBulletin 4 on one site and then decide if I would upgrade the rest of the sites. After seeing what happened when Internet Brands upgraded to vBulletin 4 and after seeing it in action I changed my plan. All my sites will now be converted to IP.Board. vBulletin 4 offers me nothing. IP.Board on the other hand has features I’ve longed for. OpenID and Windows Live as well as Facebook signon modules. Then there is IP.Converge to easily integrate users across different software platforms.

Anyway this post is to track the progress of the first vBulletin to IP.Board conversion.

Preparing for the conversion:

• Remove the archived forums that haven’t had any posts in 2 years. Done
  
• Prune inactive users. Done
  
• Remove vBulletin software and put up a site maintenance notice. Done
• Upload IP.Board and install and configure the settings. Done
• Start the vBulletin to IP.Board conversion process. Done
• Set permissions on forums and configure IP.Board Done
• Re-open site for the public Done

Removing the archive forums has been running for over an hour now. I can’t believe that pruning 27K posts would take this long. This is really eating into the timetable I setup to get this done. I hope the member prune doesn’t take this long.

Update:

I hit a snag with my database. Had to roll back to a backup. The import is going smoothly as I write this update. I decided to do this a little different. I might lose a few posts in the process because I am leaving the site live until I have IPB configured the way I want. I will then make the test site live and shutoff the live site. So far everything is progressing nicely.

Update 2:

The conversion is going along smoothly. I knew it would take a while with over 700K posts. It’s 25% done on the post import. I’m going to finish the import tonight and tommorrow I hope to go live.

Some intersting things about my site. I did a zero post user prune. When I started the site had 33,791 users. After the prune of  banned users, zero post cound users and users that haven’t visited in a year I was left with 1686 users. I would venture to guess that most of them were spammers so nothing is really lost.

Last Update

The site is converted. You can check it out at http://ms-os.com.

Some observations. In order to convert I had to install 2.3.6, convert and then upgrade to 3.0.4. I kept getting errors on post import at various stages. I edited the scripts to try and fix it and I did get farther along each time before I just gave up. I will say it was a pleasure being in code that is properly formatted and well commented. The code is clean unlike vbulletin which is a mess.

I bought my third license and will be doing another site tonight. Should be much easier this time. The site isn’t as large.

I converted another site. This one went off without a problem, but, I expected that since the site is a start up with not many posts. You can view it at http://windows2008forum.com.

I have 4 more sites to do. One larger site and 3 smaller ones. The more I used IPB the more amazed I am that I stayed with vbulletin as long as I did. I will have some vbulletin licenses and vbseo licenses  for sale in the coming weeks.  I will also write a detailed howto for those that are going to convert from vbulletin to IPB.

I’ll keep this post updated as the vBulletin to IP.Board progresses

Windows 8 Forums will follow the development of Windows 8 from the alpha stage, through the beta and RC stage all the way to RTM. Windows 8 is rumored to hit RTM sometime in 2012 which means the early alphas should start to appear any time now. At Windows 8 Forums we will post any build information complete with links to official downloads.

Why not register today and let us know what you would like to see in Windows 8.

My access to download was restored by Matt. I don’t know why it took so long to resolve this issue, but, I am glad it is over. I will continue to do business with them in the future. I have also terminated the dispute I had at Paypal.

It took a while and numerous PM’s and emails, but, in the end I got access to what I paid for and that makes me happy.

I have bought a few vbulletin skins from CompleteVB. CompleteVB has top quality designers. Unfortunately Matt the owner of CompleteVB doesn’t know how to conduct business in an honest way. I had been warned before I bought my first skin from them that CompleteVB was not to be trusted. I live by the rule once bitten, twice shy so I decided to go ahead and purchase from CompleteVB. I got what I paid for, cheap nice looking skins for my communities. Too bad all the skins still use many of the default vbulletin icons. Other than that they do look good once you correct the bugs in them.

I was looking for a dark skin for Just BS. CompleteVB had just released a new dark style. I decided to purchase it. I logged into the members area at CompleteVB and purchased the skin. This is when the nightmare began. After purchase I received the confirmation email. I clicked the link to activate the skin. I read about the new phone activation and filled in the form as required. My phone rang and I was supposed to get an activation number to put in the form. I got nothing. I tried it again. Again my phone rang and again no code. I tried one last time. This time the auto bot didn’t call. I sent a PM to Matt at CompleteVB to resolve the issue. Matt at CompleteVB told me I was a scammer and was using a proxy to bypass the activation. Matt at CompleteVB said it was my fault that I can’t download what I paid for and that it’s not his problem. I guess the credo the customer is always right doesn’t apply at CompleteVB. He insisted I am a scammer and don’t deserve a refund or access to the download. Matt at CompleteVB went on to remove my access to the other skins I previously purchased. So in effect I lost much more than the price of the one skin.

First off Matt at CompleteVB I have never used a proxy. I have never scammed anyone. I have a reputable reputation as being an honest and forthright person. I paid in good faith and instead of giving me what I purchased or a refund you told me my dispute at Paypal would be approved. This tells me, Matt at CompleteVB, that you have been down this road before screwing customers.

I have copies of the PM conversations to back up my claims. I won’t post them because they were private between me and Matt at CompleteVB. I unlike Matt at CompleteVB am an honest and reputable person.

Be warned do not do business with CompleteVB unless you want to be scammed.

Scribble Board is a place to post your thoughts or ideas to share with others. No matter what the topic you’re welcome to post. It is easy to navigate and post if you’re in a hurry to get your thoughts out. No multiple forums to confuse you. You’ll never post in the wrong forum again. So why not visit Scribble Board and scribble your thoughts today?