- Jun 7, 2000
- 9,099
- 19
- 81
A company I am associated with may consider changing forum engines in the future. The forum is used for the general public to post messages about content relevant to our community, much as AT is geared to the technical community.
We have a couple of concerns (at least that I can easily see):
We are currently having quite a few problems with our forum, including subscription notification messages being sent to people that did not request them, not being sent to folks that did request them, and in general, not being able to have a reliable e-mail notification system. It also does not like it if you try to view more than one thread at once (such as if you middle clicked a bunch of threads at once, to spawn new tabs or windows, and read them in order, reading them while others load). Archiving is also a pain, as if any specific forum/conference grows above several thousand threads (or so it appears), performance starts going downhill in a hurry... and if users want to view archived messages, they have to change forums (kinda hard to explain... it's more involved than just clicking on a different forum name, like what we're able to do here at AT... I guess you just have to know the package we're using to understand).
From my perspective, our current forum is horrible. Our president isn't very eager to change, though, because he's afraid that our community is so resistant to change that it will drive people away, or at the least, make them complain excessively. He hasn't said it, but I somehow doubt that him being nonfamiliar with PHP (and anything non-MS) helps the case much for moving to a different forum, since most of the forums that he's seen and considered were written in PHP.
I personally think that vBulletin would be an ideal forum. It's very well supported (by both Jelsoft and the user/admin community in general), can do everything except integrate the kitchen sink, and I think that it's easy to use (at least for the users - and the admin control panel isn't that hard, either). It may not look like the best forum visually (many people argue that it looks terrible), but skins can change the look of the forums somewhat. vBulletin 3.5.0 is currently in RC2 state, if I recall correctly, and a stable version will probably be coming out soon... and I see that it is *much* easier to use plugins, modifications, etc., on v3.5.0 than it was on < v3.5.0. I wouldn't deploy it to a huge community right after it became stable, but I would probably set up a test bed, and invite twenty or thirty members to the testbed, to try to break it, to find any problems that I may have missed, to come up with suggestions for improvement before going public, etc.
I'm curious as to what ATOT thinks is the best forum package out there. Am I missing something major that I need to be considering? Does anyone have any reasons or suggestions as to why vBulletin would be a poor choice?
TIA...
Repost Nazi: Begone.
Cliff's: None.
We have a couple of concerns (at least that I can easily see):
- Ensuring that the benefits of changing forums outweigh the cons (duh)
- Ensuring that the new user interface is as easy to use as possible (see next item)
- Ensuring that we do not unnecessarily aggravate or annoy our members, so as to not drive them away
- Ensuring that the new forum is easy to administer for someone that is not fluent in PHP, Apache, or anything non-Microsoft
We are currently having quite a few problems with our forum, including subscription notification messages being sent to people that did not request them, not being sent to folks that did request them, and in general, not being able to have a reliable e-mail notification system. It also does not like it if you try to view more than one thread at once (such as if you middle clicked a bunch of threads at once, to spawn new tabs or windows, and read them in order, reading them while others load). Archiving is also a pain, as if any specific forum/conference grows above several thousand threads (or so it appears), performance starts going downhill in a hurry... and if users want to view archived messages, they have to change forums (kinda hard to explain... it's more involved than just clicking on a different forum name, like what we're able to do here at AT... I guess you just have to know the package we're using to understand).
From my perspective, our current forum is horrible. Our president isn't very eager to change, though, because he's afraid that our community is so resistant to change that it will drive people away, or at the least, make them complain excessively. He hasn't said it, but I somehow doubt that him being nonfamiliar with PHP (and anything non-MS) helps the case much for moving to a different forum, since most of the forums that he's seen and considered were written in PHP.
I personally think that vBulletin would be an ideal forum. It's very well supported (by both Jelsoft and the user/admin community in general), can do everything except integrate the kitchen sink, and I think that it's easy to use (at least for the users - and the admin control panel isn't that hard, either). It may not look like the best forum visually (many people argue that it looks terrible), but skins can change the look of the forums somewhat. vBulletin 3.5.0 is currently in RC2 state, if I recall correctly, and a stable version will probably be coming out soon... and I see that it is *much* easier to use plugins, modifications, etc., on v3.5.0 than it was on < v3.5.0. I wouldn't deploy it to a huge community right after it became stable, but I would probably set up a test bed, and invite twenty or thirty members to the testbed, to try to break it, to find any problems that I may have missed, to come up with suggestions for improvement before going public, etc.
I'm curious as to what ATOT thinks is the best forum package out there. Am I missing something major that I need to be considering? Does anyone have any reasons or suggestions as to why vBulletin would be a poor choice?
TIA...
Repost Nazi: Begone.
Cliff's: None.
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