How I de-StackIdeas-ed my Jreviews Site

[Steven Koontz]

I would like to start by saying that this post is in no way slandering StackIdeas and their great suite of software. I was a long-time user of Komento, EasySocial, EasyBlog, and EasyDiscuss along with Jreviews on my site for many years. StackIdeas offers software that covers different niches than Jreviews and goes way beyond most of the competing blogging/forum/social extensions, and each of their components does what it needs to do exceptionally well. However, in my particular case, after many years of a site with the complete StackIdeas suite along with Jreviews, I was looking to simplify things. I stopped working in the web development field a couple years ago and now only maintain my own site, and time (and money) have become the two critical bottom lines for me. I also wanted to streamline the site as much as possible. So I decided to do something radical and convert my entire site (coinvalues dot com) to Jreviews-only. Below is a summary of how I transferred each StackIdeas component to Jreviews.

1. EasySocial

OK, this was a tough decision. EasySocial is an incredible component that cannot be replicated and I knew Jreviews would not be able to replace it. I have thousands of registered users, and most of them had avatars and cover images and activity from when I was allowing social media registrations (which I stopped allowing in 2021). The community was large even though most people never did anything more than sign up and ask a question in the forum or post a picture in the community. It's really incredible what StackIdeas has done with EasySocial but for my particular case I didn't think it was worth maintaining anymore. My community was not active so I just ended up with thousands of stale community pages covering photo albums, forum posts, etc... There was zero interaction between users. I had no choice but to totally nuke it. I deleted the component, did a wildcard redirect of all ES pages to my forum, and left it at that. I would have loved to have built a bustling, active community but it just wasn't happening. EasySocial was/would have been perfect for that. Since it wasn't happening for me, I chose the nuclear option. The only thing I have replaced it with is Jreviews Engage Users and Jreviews User Profiles which gives me author profile functionality, a site activity stream, and the ability for users to subscribe to categories and posts. That's about 1% of what EasySocial is capable of, but it's fine for my particular case.

2. EasyBlog

This was an easy decision to make, and while Jreviews is not considered blogging software it gets the job done just fine (and much better than core Joomla). I have 255 blog posts and researched the possibility of migrating, but there is no direct migration from EB to core Joomla. All of the migration options involved migrating through another 3rd-party component such as K2. If I had thousands of blog posts I would have set up a migration somehow, but given the relatively low number of blog articles to port, I decided to bite the bullet and do it manually. Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V 255 times. At least that way I was able control the control URLs and review the content while I was re-building the blog. Here is an example of a Jreviews blog post: https://coinvalues.com/blog/to-my-young-brothers-and-sisters-at-reddit. This one has a couple of comments (which were in Komento). I'll get to the Komento migration later.

3. EasyDiscuss

This was also an easy decision since Jreviews and its comment system (read: reviews without ratings) is perfectly tailored to a user post followed by chronologically-ordered comments. Once again, I decided to do this manually for 221 forum posts. Here is an example: https://coinvalues.com/forum/1955-silver-wheat-penny. That post has a few replies and you can see how seamlessly users can comment and upload images. I miss being able to tag and quote people but for my purposes Jreviews is perfectly adequate for my forum.

4. Komento

This is the migration I dreaded. Komento is a great commenting component and while I knew it wouldn't be a problem to replace my EB comments with Jreviews comments, I have a series of coin info sheets that are the bread and butter of my site, and many of them get comments. Most of the comments are in the form of questions and the ability of Komento to nest comments allowed me to show the parent comments and their replies in reverse chronological order where the most recent was first. You see, my site deals with coin values, and values of coins change constantly. I absolutely cannot have the oldest comment as the first with pricing information from 10 years ago. Therefore I couldn't use the simplistic approach I used for the forum because if I ordered comments chronologically, the "Answers" would be shown before the "Questions". I knew Jreviews was just not going to be able to replace Komento 1:1. The lack of nested comments in Jreviews was really presenting me with a problem here. And that's fine, because Jreviews is not commenting software. As much as I have always hated the "review discussion" functionality of Jreviews where it takes you to a separate page to see the replies to reviews (which is fine and the way it should be for review comments but sucks for general commenting), I quickly realized that format would fit my "Q&A" sessions quite well. So, for each of the hundreds of comments I had in Komento, I took each original comment and made it a review (without ratings of course). And each nested reply in Komento I made it a review discussion for the original "review". It's not ideal but it turns out that it works pretty well for my site. Here is an example of how a Jreviews "review detail" page can be a valuable Q&A page after I lost access to nested commenting from Komento: https://coinvalues.com/kennedy-half-dollar/1964. That is a coin info sheet with two questions, each having various answers. Again, not ideal, but I am happy with the result. Many of these Q&A "review detail" pages are getting search hits from Google now. 

5. Post-Data

As stated above, this is not an anti-StackIdeas post. However, since my main reasons for doing this were to simplify and optimize the site and reduce my dependence on 3rd-party software, I will show you some data of the size of my Akeeba backup:

Backup size went from 290MB to 104MB after uninstalling EasySocial, EasyDiscuss, EasyBlog, Komento, and deleting media folders.
Backup size went from 104MB to 63MB after dropping EasySocial, EasyDiscuss, EasyBlog, and Komento database tables.

That's a 129% reduction in size!

This change also greatly reduced the number and size of JS files that were blocking page rendering. The speed increase I saw after performing this change was notable. It even inspired me to completely rethink my entire web footprint strategy. I was using AWS EC2 as a server, RackSpace for email, and GoDaddy for DNS. Well, I nuked RackSpace and GoDaddy as well, and now have my entire web ecosystem in AWS. I placed the EC2 instance behind a load balancer and added a WAF with a load of security protections and the site is faster and more secure than ever. And as a bonus I have eradicated the bot traffic from China that had exploded in volume in September which was skewing my Analytics data.

To close I would like to send a hearty thank you to Alejandro at Jreviews for this wonderful software which has allowed me to do incredible things for my own site as well as my former clients' sites over the years, as well as a shout out to Mark at StackIdeas (I believe he is no longer part of the organization) for years of great software and support.

[n00bster]

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[Steven Koontz]

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