I’ve now been co-running the ‘Vauxhall Owners Network” since around 1997, a website originally started out by Ste Ebblewhite years ago as a resource website to help other owners of Vauxhall Cavaliers (CavWeb).

Originally running ‘Ultimate Bulletin Board’ by InfoPop (anyone else remember that?), Ste got me involved to help out on the ‘technical side’ of the forums, the first step was to port over to vBulletin, THE forum software of the time, so powerful and advanced compared to what we were accustomed to! – What an effort, the importer didn’t work properly so none of the threads came over, just the members, so a team of us re-entered as many of the threads deemed useful as possible.

I’ve just looked on the way back machine, some serious nostalgia there! – Anyway, we carried down the path, installing the bigger and better versions of vB as it evolved and our site grew, right up until November 2011.

One of the things we always tried to do with the forum software was try and be early adopters, give our users something new to look at, new features to use and play with and ultimately try and be first amongst our fellow car enthusiasts… this ultimately led to us upgrading to vBulletin 4 (we even upgraded our live site at beta stage). This was the first time we’d experienced grief from our users, ‘it’s too cartoony’, ‘looks horrible’, ‘I won’t be coming back’ etc… we shrugged it off, you can’t please everyone all the time etc.. everything was ticking along for a while, I’d even managed to make a retro style theme for those that craved the look of days gone.

The problem started to happen the bigger we got, the more users / threads / posts seriously ground the forum speed down, we had to move hosts and upgrade server to cope with the load, even the well established host we were with was surprised by the server load generated by a (fairly big) forum, the better deal we’d got with our hosting soon ended up costing us more for the extra memory needed to cope with vB4. the extra RAM kept the site running fairly well.

Tim from Nimbus Hosting told me about a new forum software company called XenForo, it was a company made up of some of the ex-vbulletin dev’s who worked on vBulletin 3, names I recognised back from the days of getting support. I found the website and promptly bookmarked it (wasn’t available to see at the time) and kept checking in. As soon as the software was up for grabs we purchased it, setup a test server and started playing with it. After a lengthy test upgrade (left it going overnight in the end) I was blown away, the simple but elegant styling, the excellent use of AJAX, the simplicity of the thing! We all agreed that we must move the forum over to XenForo as soon as possible, but we would have to wait for a few key features.

Version 1 went stable, we did another test upgrade, still excellent, but we had to wait for 1.1 to get Thread Prefixes as these had been heavily used on our forums (used within the car help forums, the prefix is the model – very useful).

1.1 got released! I tried some importers, but the prefixes wouldn’t import over! – Thanks to a wonderful person on the XF forums, a 1.1 importer that worked was made. 2 test upgrades later and we were good to go.

Saturday the 27th of November, I got up at 7:30am, closed the vB forum down and started the daunting task of a forum import containing over 2 million posts (250k threads)! – Suffice to say it took a while, but it got there in the end, for anyone interested, or even contemplating it, here’s the import stats:

We re-opened the forums and awaited the grief we got when we moved to vB4, surprisingly on the first day (there’s always a few moaners ) all we had was praise, mainly about how quick it is! – Compared to vBulletin, XenForo absolutely flys! We are using approximately half the memory too!

So, am I happy? Do I miss vBulletin? Would I ever go back?

Yes, extremely, the software works fantastically well, so so fast, and such a pleasure to use.

No! – I would like a couple of features we used in there ported over, but this is XenForo 1.1, that was v4, we are only just getting started

No! – Internet Brands have turned a fast popular product into something bloaty, vBulletin 4 seems to me like Windows Vista, they were too keen to show off a revamped look and extra features and chucked it out of the door (that made me dump Windows, now a very happy Mac user)

I’d like to finish this blog entry off by thanking Tim from Nimbus Hosting (excellent hosts of both vBulletin and XenForo) and XenForo and it’s community, everyone is so keen to help, I’ve had replies to help threads within seconds! (normally by the amazingly helpful Brogan – If there’s a user of the year award, he should get it) – Go check them both out.

Dave.

If you run a big website it’s almost bound to happen to you at some point or another, we’ve (Vauxhall Owners Network) been hacked before, it’s normally just something like the index file getting replaced with some hacking groups logo, but this time they actually started messing with settings within vbulletin to edit templates with the goal being to replace the Google publisher ID to their own!

This went on for about 4/5 days on and off as I couldn’t work out initially how they’d got in, but with the help of Tim from Nimbus Hosting (the hosting company that looks after VxON) he found an exploit within one of our plugins! We removed the plugin and eradicated all the security holes. Here’s some tips how to do the same.

Make sure your copy of vbulletin is up-to-date with the version and latest patches – Hackers will look for known exploits, don’t make it any easier for your site to be compromised.

Update your plugin’s and hacks for vbulletin – this is ultimately how we were hacked, we had an older version of VBSEO, this was then exploited and various backdoors installed.

Ensure your passwords are secure – It’s very easy to think that ‘no one will guess my password’, I was probably naive enough to think so too as I’d got a couple of words not often used together with some numbers, that is still brute-forceable.

A tip the IT guy at my work gave me was to perhaps think of a centance or combination of words, then use the first two or three letters of those interjected with some numbers and special characters. This was it’s easier to remember, but still nice and secure (I.e. My Dog Has a Brown Nose could be MDoHaABrNo*53).

Get the admin / mod team to do the same, and check that your MySQL password is also secure.

Password protect  your admincp directory – Use .htaccess to add another layer of security, there are plenty of guides available on how to do this, you might even have the option built into your hosting control panel (with Nimbus we use Plesk that lets you simply ‘Password Protect’ directories). Make sure this password is different to your vbulletin login.

Rename the folders for your Admincp and Modcp for vbulletin – You can call these what you like, so long as you then rename the paths within the config.php file

Comment if you’ve got any questions!

Dave.