Migrating the forums from Vanilla to bbPress
Over the weekend we migrated the forums from Vanilla to bbPress. There are a number of reasons why we decided to do it (the increasing SPAM attacks mainly) but what urged us to do it now was the recent announcement for end of support for the Vanilla 2.0.18.x branch. This left us with the choice to either move to Vanilla 2.1, which was probably not going to be a trivial task, or migrate to bbPress. So we decided the benefits of moving to a simplified and complete WordPress solution would be more in the long run.
The conversion process is well documented in this great post at CSS Tricks, which helped us a lot, so we won't cover it in details:
http://css-tricks.com/the-move-to-bbpress/
What you need to know is that your old Vanilla user accounts should continue to work in the forums and all your posts should be preserved. We've also tried to style bbPress similarly to the Vanilla forums theme we used. So, hopefully, you won't feel any major negative effects of the transition.
Since the amount of SPAM accounts had grown immensely recently, we just took the step to remove all accounts that had zero posts. We're sorry if this affects any legitimate users but this was really the most sensible thing we could do about it.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please don't hesitate to drop us a line.