Need to check a couple of things before I decide to use Bubble

Questions
1

Hey everyone, hope you’re all well!

I run a very big forum that I’m pretty proud of. It’s been around for 17 years and it’s still going strong. However, forums are coming to the end of their era for communities and they’re slowly being phased out (at least in my opinion).

There’s always been a lot I have wanted to do but due to technical limitations (hopefully overcome now via bubble), I haven’t been able to do them. For anyone interested, the game our community is centred around is called Football Manager.

I’m tech-savvy but I’m not a full-stack programmer (I can make a Discord bot in js or tweak some
CSS but that’s my limit).

So here are my dilemmas:

  1. Database migration. My site has 512,000 members, it’s a given that I wouldn’t want to lose that. How would I migrate that into Bubble?

  2. Posts and threads. We have over 600,000 threads and over 2,000,000 posts. I’d like to be able to display this in some kind of legacy thread viewer (built on top of an API). There’s a lot of backlinks there that it would hurt to lose.

  3. I have just under a year to build this web application, given Football Manager 2020 just released. Will I have enough time to as a minimum be able to replicate (albeit in a better way) the current site features like Downloads and Articles?

Anyways, cheers everyone. I realise FM Base is a pretty big community so if any of you are here - reach out to me. I’m an all hands on deck kinda guy.

Edit: In case someone else has done this exact transition, the forum software is Xenforo 2.1

2

Are you sure you want to use Bubble for this? Honestly, Bubble is not the best for SEO and large dynamic database performance.

Your site seems pretty big, maybe hire a developer to code a site? I love Bubble and all but I’m not sure it’s the best for this use case.

3

That’s a shame, I really love the idea behind Bubble and the fact that I could create exactly what I want.

What’s the issue with SEO?

4

You might not get the URL structure you want for your pages. And google might have trouble crawling your site.

You also can not choose your hosting provider it’s locked to AWS with Bubble code. And if you have a large amount of records to load in dynamically, Bubble is not the fastest at loading in this data in my experience.

Bubble is made mostly for people who can’t code and don’t have a huge budget but want to build complex web app. And it’s pretty good at that, no other no code tool that I have seen comes close to the features you can build.

You can certainly try it with Bubble, just not sure if it is the best fit.

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