Advice on using XenFora

Discussion in 'Technical Assistance' started by Liturgyworks, Jun 25, 2019.

  1. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    I’m the sysadmin for two forums relating to the Orthodox churches, and we are considering migrating to XenFora. I’ve had very positive experiences with it as an end user here, and on several other forums, and right now one of our forums uses PhPBB and the other an even nastier forum called Simple Machines Forum.

    While XenFora is unquestionably the best from an end user perspective, it does cost some dough, although we can afford it; however, I would really like to talk to some people who are actually running it to see what it is like in terms of installation, system maintenance and resource utilization, as I don’t want us to buy XenFora and then have it turn into a nightmare app which sucks up all the resources on our server.

    Would it be possible for one of your admins or your IT guy to PM me? I would greatly appreciate any insights you could offer.

    We are running a dedicated server with VMware vSphere 6, FreeBSD and LinuxMint VMs (like Ubuntu but without systemd), and we have a quad core Xeon CPU with hyperthreading (so eight threads), 32 GB RAM and dual 500 GB solid state disks. It’s a bit overkill for our current operations, but the idea is to have some room for expansion; also, if we standardize on one forum software for our two forums, VMware allows the virtual machines to be cloned, and thin-provisioned, and also does on-the-fly memory deduplication and compression, so the marginal resource consumption for each extra virtual machine running a similar workload is very low. Plus we can run FreeBSD jails or Linux containers if we want greater efficiencies.
     
  2. Lucian Hodoboc

    Lucian Hodoboc New Member

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    First of all, it is called XenForo, not XenFora. :blush:

    Secondly, I respectfully disagree. Have you heard about Woltlab and Invisionpower? While the latter is incredibly expensive, the former (Woltlab) has most of the features of XenForo at almost half of its price. It has plugins, themes, a photo and video gallery etc., and a support community where you can get answers for any questions and issues related to the script. And yes, you can convert from phpBB and Simple Machines to Woltlab without losing anything from the database. :)

    Thirdly, may I join your communities? I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian and I'd like to check out your forums, so if you'd be so kind as to private message me the links, I'd be very grateful. :halo:

    Best of luck with your projects! :thumbsup:
     
  3. Liturgyworks

    Liturgyworks Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Thank you for the information!