Hey, I'm starting a new site and plan on integrating a forum into the site. Has anyone tried phpbb3? Is it any good? Also with vbulletin do I either pay a one off fee of $160 or a yearly fee of $85? Just a little confused about the different licenses. Cheers
The owned license is $160 which is a one shot deal. Buy it and never have to worry about another thing... till you need an upgrade. To maintain upgrades it's another $30 a year, which also covers tech support. The $85 a year is the lease price. It's less in the short term, more in the long term. As long as you are paying the anual $85 you get support & upgrades. If you plan on keeping the site for more then a year or two, then I suggest this method. If you plan on keeping the site/forum up for years, buy it...
I think I will probably end up buying the lease package for a year to see how it goes, then I will have a better idea of what direction the sites going in. Then I can decide if I want to buy it or not Is vbulletin still the best forum available?
You can purchase vb owned license, its always a better option and later in case it doesn't do well you can sell it whereas in leased you can't sell.
IMHO, yes! But then my opinion is bias... I like it so much, I border on being a fanboy, lol. The owned license is better, in that if you decide to keep it, you can, and if you opt to sell it, you can at least make half the money back. Either way, before you lease ask in the presales forum on vb.com the costs fromgoing leased to paid...I do not recall if you need to fork over an entire 160 of if you just need to make up the difference. (but I am thinking it's full cost) Once you get it, let me know, and I can give you some great articles on promotion and using it. Even if you are well promoted, if you are new to vB then you may enjoy... vBulletin Forum Moderation Explained and A Guide to Searching Digital Point (which other then a few options, is great for any vB forum).
Cheers, will be sorting it out this shortly as I've almost finished the rest of the site bar the forum. Rep added for the articles
vBulletin is pretty good but their hierachy is difficult at times to walk through. Keep it simple does not seem to be their motto. Community Server is pretty good along with WebWiz.
Just an afterthought: I have been thinking of buying a VB software but it's beyond my budget at this time. I am using SMF in my forum sites. What I noticed is that Google is indexing more pages in VB site than an SMF site. But SMF has the best security ever.
If you like the indexing power of vB and it's features, then open a thread asking for donations from your member base. Offer special perks for the core contributors, then offer "gold member status" to subscriptions. AFAIK, vB does a pretty darn good job at keeping on top of security and related issues. It's one of the reasons that 3.7 is 3.7.8 PL2 as the only thing they truly added (other then one glitch to fix IE) was security related. Often, these fixes were put out within hours of the bug release. I can not speak for SMF, I've never bothered to keep track. Just saying that vB is generally on top of things.