I'm about to re-design a very old forum of mine from the ground up...but I haven't been active in the vB community for a long time. I'd be interested to hear everyone's opinion on what their "must have" modifications are from vBulletin.org?
I highly recommend these modifications VBSE sitemap generator - a must have for getting your pages indexed. And be sureu to submit the sitmap to your webmaster tools on bing, yahoo and google. AME - Automatic Media Embedding - just post a youtube URL and the video is embedded into your site. Stop Forum Spam - checks the persons IP address and email address against the Stop Forum Spam database of spammers.
I like this mod Cyb - Advanced Forum Statistics Displays advanced statistics about your forum such as members threads posts referrers
That list is pretty good, lot of things I have never used before. I also like Who-has-visited to give an overview of all the users that have been on the forum in the last day. Also post last x hours is similar showing how many posts and threads were created. These two will help you to see how busy your forum is.
I've heard a lot about vbseo, but DP doesnt have it i dont think? post thank you also seems cool... -C
The only thing anyone has listed that actually is must have (in my opinion) is the anti-spam one (we don't use it here though, we developed out own). The rest of them are more or less useless as far as I'm concerned.
Thanks Shawn....your opinions are always valued... Thanks for the recommended Anti Spam plugin... Would you say that "Stop Forum Spam" is the best besides obviously hand coding your own??? Shawn i thought you guys had over 100 plugins?
Yeah, we have ~250 plug-ins. All but a few were made by us. I really have no clue what is "the best" anti-spam plug-in out there. I don't really look at them because if I want ours to do something, I just code it to do so. No real point in looking at the other ones. Yeah... I don't use sitemaps on any site I own. To be honest, Sitemaps just seem like a way for Google to shut up webmasters about getting their site included in the Google index. It doesn't rank them any better than if they had no sitemap, and well. If your site is so poorly laid out with it's link structure that Google can't even find your pages on it's own, it probably need more work than just a sitemap.
Oh, my. Well, there are a few I love, though some of them aren't "official" modifications you download. For example, I took the user groups page and turned it into a staff list, which I linked to in the nav bar, and which I also included a message at the top of that links to a topic where staff provided further details about themselves. As for "official" modifications: IPInfo. As you must have gathered, it provides me more IP info to help track dishonest people trying to circumvent punishment. Multiple Account Detection & Prevention. Speaks for itself. Nexia's Basics Addons for Admincp. Nexia really made the front page of my ACP all the more nifty. I'm glad to be able to upload a product on that page, for example. Nexia's Forumhome Newscast. I like it more than Cyb's advanced statistics, and other alternatives, because it actually displays the content of the post (the amount of characters, and amount of posts, are controlled through the ACP). vS-Rules. It made customizing the rules listing on the registration page easier. Welcome Headers. Lots of different messages you can display, depending on your needs. Great to have. TCattd - The Image Resizer. My favorite of the image resizer modifications. It comes with my favorite resize mode: Floatbox v2.45.