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Migration from phpBB

Hi folks,

I am an absolute newbie to Vanilla. I am considering migrating a large board from phpBB, as development on phpBB appears to have stalled, and it is beginning to smell of mothballs.

I have installed Vanilla 2.2 on a development machine and migrated the database with remarkably few problems (well done whoever wrote the porter). At first glance, I love the administration dashboard and the intuitive UI. It has pretty well all I need out of the box, but I have a couple of questions before I can make a final decision.

  • Does anyone know of a way of scripting a converter for internal links to other posts on the same forum after these have been imported from phpBB. From an initial look, they do not seem to have been converted, but I expect that I could customize the porter script to do the job if necessary. But if anyone has solved this already, it would be great.
  • We have a number of visually impaired users, not least of all myself as admin. Captchas are a nightmare. I have huge problems with visual Captchas, but I simply cannot solve the audio ones at all. phpBB allowed a Q&A authentication method which massively reduced spambot registrations on our forum. Is there an AddOn that does something similar? I don't really want to go down the path of Administrator confirmation, as we have had anything up to several hundred spambot registration attempts per day in the past.
  • Is there an AddOn to allow guests and registered users to select their own theme? This is very important to allow visually impaired users to choose a highly accessible, high-contrast theme, while leaving the default theme in situ for most users.
  • For phpBB I wrote a heavily customized accessibility theme based on selective information hiding. Has anyone done anything similar for Vanilla?

I would appreciate answers to any or all of these questions. Thanks in advance. User-selectable themes really is a showstopper for me.

Comments

  • LincLinc Detroit Admin

    Howdy!

    You don't need to convert internal links; check out the Redirector plugin. You want a global solution that works for links on other sites too, not just a find-and-replace on your own data; Redirector covers that.

    We're going to be upgrading to the new, simpler Google reCAPTCHA for 2.3. There are plugins available in the addon directory that may fill your need until then.

    No, there's no per-user theming that I'm aware of. However, writing a simple plugin to add a "visually impaired" stylesheet for users who opt into it would be pretty trivial.

  • @Linc Thanks for that. The accessibility theme I wrote for phpBB is far more complex than just styling and something similar would need more than just css, but I had been expecting to do something similar for Vanilla. I shall have a look at the Redirector plugin to see whether it does the job.

    I'll have a detailed look at all the accessibility issues and see what I can come up with. As I say, Vanilla is like a breath of fresh air, and I would like to solve the issues over the next six months or so. I could almost certainly cobble something together, but I am strictly an amateur programmer and am not looking forward to learning yet another framework!

  • whu606whu606 I'm not a SuperHero; I just like wearing tights... MVP
    edited January 2016

    For style switching, I used the styleswitch.js file from Dynamic Drive.

    This page walks you through how to set it up:

    http://www.websitecodetutorials.com/code/javascript/style-sheet-switcher.php

    All you would need is to load the css files and the styleswitch.js file in your default.master.tpl file, and add links to the page for your users.

  • @Linc said:
    Howdy!
    We're going to be upgrading to the new, simpler Google reCAPTCHA for 2.3. There are plugins available in the addon directory that may fill your need until then.

    it is not possible to use my plugin without a small patch currently. I submitted a pull request.

    grep is your friend.

  • @whu606 Thanks a million. I shall look at that. I would need to include some complex styling in the templates and a JS script to show or hide certain material on demand, but that all looks doable.

    @x00 Thanks for the headsup.

  • whu606whu606 I'm not a SuperHero; I just like wearing tights... MVP

    I use this addon: https://vanillaforums.org/addon/addregistrationquestion-plugin

    to prevent bot applicants.

    You can set a question that is relevant to your forum userbase, and obviously style it to suit your users.

    In tandem with this addon:

    https://vanillaforums.org/addon/registrationrestrictlogger-plugin

    I've seen bot applicants drop to 0.

  • Thanks. I saw both of those, and they would go a long way. The problem with a single question is that it needs changing every week or so. The phpBB option allows you to store any number of questions and it picks a random one, but I'm sure that plugin could be adapted to do something similar. The most important thing for us is to somehow block the bots while not using Captchas.

  • whu606whu606 I'm not a SuperHero; I just like wearing tights... MVP

    @philwhite

    tbh, I've had the same question since I set it up, and whilst I used to get loads of spambot applicants,I now don't get any.

  • We have phenomenal Google rankings for relevant searches and are on all the spambot target lists. As soon as a human spammer cracks the first question, it gets passed on to the bots. Even with 40+ outrageous questions ("What is the missing word: All spammers should be hung, _____ and quartered."), we have to write a new set every few months because the bots have got enough of the answers to make life unpleasant.

    But writing a single question every couple of weeks or if we get hit is not too painful. We could probably live with that.

  • LincLinc Detroit Admin

    I'd add that we have a keen interest in accessibility issues, and welcome any specific suggestions we can implement to improve our performance in this area on our issue tracker.

  • Would love to be involved in any way I can. I shall be doing some intensive screen reader testing over the next few weeks (I generally use magnifiers and simple TTS on the web as I find it a lot faster than using my screen reader). As far as I can see at present, it seems Section 508 compliant, but usability is more than Section 508.

    But it is a lot better than most other forums out of the box.

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