Okay, before I launch my forum, I'd like some advice. Pretty much anything you could say to give me a strong, long-lasting, and successful forum. It'll be vBulletin. Also, is vBulletin easy to skin? What about SEO? Just general advice would be greatly appreciated.
Don't add too many forums too quickly. It took me about 2 hours to change the colors and icons the way I wanted them. Get your friends involved.
If I had my time again I would spend a month doing loads of great post on the subject of the forum thus when you launch it would have great posts to get people to post Big tip is always leave your post open i.e what do you think, titles like ` help needed ` , reg several names and take to yourself at first plus always welcome new members . It does depend on your market on how easy it is to get guest to convert to being members As for Vb is easy to do but do not over com thing as most people are still on 56k ( well in the UK ) and heavy skins will add to load time Look at this forum and its time scale its simple does what people want and does not put off people My forum is only small but growing If you cannot give the time in the first year or you do not love your subject matter then do not bother as if you will not post the why should anyone else Best thing Ive ever done ; have made loads of great friends and now travel the country meeting people
my forum ranks for some terms (even tho main domain is kinda in the sandbox still) and thats with no seo effert (Hmmmm) also VB is a lot easier to skin that say phpBB (from my experiences anyway)
I must say that I tried a free alternative, wasted way too much time, and plan to jump to vBulletin very soon. Brandon
vb is the best, no doubt. you've got to start out as active as possible. The first 500 members are the hardest, after that it'll take off on it's own.
So some extent... but I wouldn't say that's *entirely* true. As an end-user (before I started my own forum), I tended to shy away from phpBB and used vBulletin forums more (for no other reason than it being vB... there are of course users who do the opposite as well). But from a moderators/administrator's standpoint, nothing can touch vBulletin. And when something needs very little moderation/administration things tend to run smoother. To be honest, if I had to do everything I do for this forum with only the tools phpBB offers, I would have been burnt out on running a forum a long time ago. Burnt out admins/mods are not good.
I assume that you're talking about the basic phpBB installation. There are hundreds of MODs that add features to make it all a lot easier, even for people who don't want to wade into the PHP code to customize it themselves.
True, but I'm not a big fan of the argument of "well you can change it to make it do what you want". With that argument you could say WordPress (blog) could be better than vBulletin because it's open source and you can make it do what you want (include turning it into forum software).
I've never used WordPress but I don't know if they have the MODs base and the screening->approval process for those MODs the way phpBB does. Until v3.5, I really did not like vBulletin. Then again, until v8 I really did not like DreamWeaver.
As an extensive forum poster/user I like both vbulletin and phpbb. I think at a very stock level vbulletin is significantly better than phpbb. I think both are extended and can do different things. I think the open-ness of PHPBB has led to a bit more along the lines of extended variety, at least from my experience. I see more phpbb boards dirvege from stock than I do vbulletin. Again a lot of that has to do with vbulletin being better at its core. Like I said, though, as I user I don't have a problem with either one of them. I am comfortable with both. Going around the web and seeing some of the atrocious forum software out there, I thank god for both vbulletin and phpbb. It has only taken 20 years for the internet to get the functionality bbs's used to have. I like some of the new features Shawn mentioned for the latest Vbulletin, but I haven't run a Vbulletin board yet myself. It is on my agenda in the future. Right now I run several phpbb boards and don't have many issues. My only concern is the next major phpbb update is going to take my a long time to make, because my sites have been modded a lot of it by me..so it will all have to be manually upgraded. As a long-term time investment, that is a bad strategy.
I agree, although if you are using approved phpBB MODs many of those will probably be incorporated into the next major release. I suspect there will be more of the ones I don't want than the ones I do want, though...
When the hell are they going to do that anyway? I've been hearing how the next version of phpBB is going to be a vBulletin killer for 2 years now. They haven't even made suppression session IDs for spiders standard yet... Which I don't understand at all. Then again, they have very little incentive to get it done since it's free. IMO they really need to make a paid/Pro version... if for no other reason it gives them incentive to speed things up. For me (as a vBulletin user), I really wish they *would* come out with a "vBulletin killer". As it stands now vBulletin doesn't have a whole lot of competition for what they are doing and that scares me a little bit.
I can't disagree... this new version of vBulletin has a lot to recommend it. I'm really tempted to convert for the first time...
Okay, a similar question now, this time for vBulletin users. What makes vBulletin so much better than php? There are mods for php, and many things can be added.
It's hard to explain without seeing the backend. As a developer myself, I can say their underlying code is as close to a piece of art as possible. For the admin stuff, I would suggestion playing with the free admin demo here: http://www.vbulletin.com/admindemo.php
What I don't understand is: why don't people conpare vBulletin and PHPBB with Invision Power Board? Invision Power Board is also fairly clean, and costs around the same amount as vB. Is there something I am missing out on, becuase I've used IPB for a while and am fairly content with it...
Sounds like the perfect opening for DPulletin. As for PHPBB yeah I don't know when the next major release is going to come out.. It does seem like the day after never. Considering how much time I waste when I put up a new forum just putting in things that should probably be options to begin with... it becomes a bid annoying.