I bought a site that has phpBB

**Ajeet** · July 7th, 2011, 5:00 PM

Hi,

I recently bought a site that has a phpBB forum on it.

I find the thought of learning new software, maintaining it, and running a forum repulsive. But the site has good rankings, and several of them are for the forum, so I cannot just remove the forum.

Any ideas?

**tke71709** · July 7th, 2011, 6:15 PM

You bought it, you have two choices.

1) Maintain it
2) Get rid of it because if you don't do 1 you'll be hacked in no time.

I'm not sure why one would buy a site where they find a large portion of it repulsive though.

You could always try hiring someone to maintain it when necessary, I assume it comes with mods and the such already.

**Clinton** · July 8th, 2011, 4:41 AM

There are people who specialise in converting phpBB to vB. I found one of them at the vB forum and he converted one such forum for me about a year ago. I remember it costed peanuts.

**benitez17** · July 8th, 2011, 5:56 AM

Is it an active forum? If not, locking it down might be the best option.

**Ajeet** · July 8th, 2011, 8:15 AM

Originally Posted by benitez17

Is it an active forum? If not, locking it down might be the best option.

This might be a noob question, but will locking it down (virtually) eliminate the risk of it getting hacked?

**grynge** · July 8th, 2011, 10:16 AM

Originally Posted by Ajeet

This might be a noob question, but will locking it down (virtually) eliminate the risk of it getting hacked?

No it will just stop spammers and any new comments.

**petertdavis** · July 8th, 2011, 7:23 PM

You could also find someone to manage it for you. I've been doing that for several people on a rev-share basis. That might be especially useful if you have an active community on the forum. Alternative, you could sell the forum and have the new owner move the forum off to a different domain and put static pages in place of the ones that have the rankings you wanted to preserve. Or, if there's no community there on the forum anyway, you could dump the forum and put up static pages. If you just leave phpBB in place, even if you lock it down, it's going to be a liability to you as new exploits are found, at the very least you'll still have to keep the software updated. Send me a pm, I'd like to have a look at your site anyway, maybe I could at least give you some more specific advice.

**Kay** · July 9th, 2011, 5:56 AM

Hi Ajeet

I'm interested in this too as I'm a bit of a forum junkie and would like to have a look in case I can offer you anything useful. Please PM me with the URL if you'd like me to make any suggestions.

**Clarkie** · July 11th, 2011, 1:53 AM

If you're converting you can look at these options; MyBB (the best free option), IPB and XenForo. Lot's of webmasters I've spoken too hate vBulletin due to it's use of resources and ridiculous price compared. You're going to be looking for something where it won't change the post ID when you convert so that you can use .htaccess to forward people to the new address automatically.