Reopening this thread, as Ive been doing some evaluation of software, and looking at the logs to see exactly how LSC is being used.
Any kind of migration to a new package isnt going to be fun, and much of what’s out there is written using older tooling. There are a few packages that stand out, and Im spinning up test versions of these all so I can try to import, and then see how they handle the load. None of these have a direct importer from the package I currently use. Not many have any kind of importer at all. Many packages get around the “large site” problem by archiving, or outright deleting, older messages/inactive users/etc. Something I really have never wanted to do. So I need something that can handle a large amount of data.
Leading my evaluation are vBulletin, Discourse, SimpleMachines, and Thredded. Each has its own plusses and minuses. vBulletin feels familiar, but you are also buying into the whole community, its very bloat heavy, and that feels very much like the package Im using now. Discourse is an interesting take on traditional forums, breaking that wall with a flat view of posts (which, most of you go to first anyway), and then you can ‘tag’ posts with categories. Its intriguing. SimpleMachines and Thredded are both traditional-looking forums. Thredded is bare-bones without a lot of bloat, but I’d have to write a lot of the site myself.
None of these comes with an easy-to-implement chat package, but chat is actually pretty simple, and there’s a bunch of ways I could implement this.
Anyway, this was just a note that Im deep diving into the evaluation, so stay tuned.