Migrating from XenForo to RaxBoard in under an hour

Migrating a forum is one of those projects everyone postpones until the renewal bill arrives. RaxBoard ships with a one-click XenForo importer specifically because we wanted to remove that excuse. This is a practical walk-through of what the migration actually does, what it preserves, and what you need to check after it completes.

What the importer copies

The importer runs in the RaxBoard admin panel under Admin → Migrate. You point it at your existing XenForo database with read-only credentials, it inspects the schema version, and then it streams the following entities into your new install:

• Users: name, email, password hash (BCrypt → Argon2id rehashed at first login), join date, post count, custom title, banner.
• Threads and posts: titles, BBCode body (translated to RaxBoard markup), timestamps, edit history, post counts. Reaction data is mapped onto the multi-reaction model.
• Attachments: physical files copied into the RaxBoard storage directory, attachment rows linked to their original posts.
• Permissions: usergroups become RaxBoard roles. Forum-level permissions become per-section role overrides.
• 301 redirects: every old threads/<slug>.<id> URL gets a permanent redirect to its new RaxBoard URL so backlinks stay intact.

What you should check after

Run the post-migration audit (also under Admin → Migrate). It diffs row counts between the two databases and flags anything that did not survive the copy. The most common issue is custom BBCode that the importer could not translate cleanly — those posts get a [legacy] wrapper and are flagged for manual review.

Then crawl the new site with a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Verify the redirects fire, internal links resolve, and image src attributes point at the new attachment paths. A 1M-post board typically takes about 45 minutes to migrate and 20 minutes to audit.

Cutover

The recommended cutover is a five-minute DNS flip after the migration completes and the audit passes. The legacy XenForo install can stay online behind a different hostname for a week so you have a rollback target. Once you are confident, archive the XenForo files and free the license.

If you run into anything unusual, open a support ticket from the client area — migration support is included in the first 12 months of every license.