Any scary stories about upgrading to vb4.0?

I'm having a whole redesign of my site and wanted to go with vB4.0 for it...but I'm kind of hesitant. Is there anything I should know ahead of time before upgrading? Anything I should plan for? Time it takes to update? Mind you, I will have a skin fully coded for 4.0.1 when I update so I won't need to do any of that and I'm planning on uninstalling all mods before I update.

Originally Posted by jbartle

I'm having a whole redesign of my site and wanted to go with vB4.0 for it...but I'm kind of hesitant. Is there anything I should know ahead of time before upgrading? Anything I should plan for? Time it takes to update? Mind you, I will have a skin fully coded for 4.0.1 when I update so I won't need to do any of that and I'm planning on uninstalling all mods before I update.

My visitors weren't too pleased with vB4. As you've heard, it is a bit buggy. There are also some questionable choices and changes from vB3. As an example, QuickNavigation is a downgrade from the Forum Jump > Go that was in place.

It's been a bumpy ride since upgrading, but I'm in it for the long haul. It took me about an hour to do everything. I set up a test folder with a copy of my DB. At that time, I shut off my forum. Once I was done with the upgraded version, I simply renamed my folders. /forum/ to /vb3 and my new forum from /vb4/ to /forum.

Not sure why, but the default is now forum.php for the forum homepage. I got around this by renaming index.php to old_index.php and changing forum.php to index.php. Not sure if this is the correct way to do things, but it worked for me.

Just make a list of all your code changes -- Google analytics, etc. Slowly go down the list and hope for the best. Good luck!

Originally Posted by serphog

My visitors weren't too pleased with vB4. As you've heard, it is a bit buggy. There are also some questionable choices and changes from vB3. As an example, QuickNavigation is a downgrade from the Forum Jump > Go that was in place.

It's been a bumpy ride since upgrading, but I'm in it for the long haul. It took me about an hour to do everything. I set up a test folder with a copy of my DB. At that time, I shut off my forum. Once I was done with the upgraded version, I simply renamed my folders. /forum/ to /vb3 and my new forum from /vb4/ to /forum.

Not sure why, but the default is now forum.php for the forum homepage. I got around this by renaming index.php to old_index.php and changing forum.php to index.php. Not sure if this is the correct way to do things, but it worked for me.

Just make a list of all your code changes -- Google analytics, etc. Slowly go down the list and hope for the best. Good luck!

Thank you. I'm on a big board, so the forum jump was something I didn't enable due to server resources (I just figured it would take up more), so that won't be a problem.

Yeah, the index.php is now the homepage. I'm just going to move that to the root so that way the cms is at the / and I'll have the forum.php changed to index.php in the /forums folder.

As for code, the new skin is being coded as we speak so every thing is going to be added to the skin prior to us actually updating the main board.

Thank you for your reply. I greatly appreciate it.

I suggest you to make tests before upgrading your live board as vBulletin 4 upgrade script adds index to post table which is a heavy process. If your board has over 1.5 million posts i strongly advise you to create a support ticket within vBulletin.com for Big Board Upgrade Assistance

These are my stats:
Threads: 135,958, Posts: 1,026,262, Members: 104,738

Should I still get their help?

I would suggest copying your DB to a test instance and running the upgrade on the test area first. As mert says, there's a big index task in the upgrade which on most large sites, it simply times-out.