sC's decision to go vB

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Simbazz

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sC's decision to go vB

Obviously i've been away from the forums since December, but at the start the origional 4 talked about not getting vB.

I'm not saying its a bad decision, i much prefer the software. I just wanted to know how, and in what ways will it benifit the whole community? (What type of plug-ins etc. will be able to do the same, and more, than the origional software)

Hope you guys don't mind me asking :) Just wanted AB's and Mas' (is this the name you prefer these days? :p) thoughts. And any other staff :)

Simon.
 
Re: sC's decision to go vB

SMF is a great piece of software but as is often true, you only get what you pay for and its limitations were holding us back slightly. I feel another factor was the frustration in having limited choices in some areas (the portal for example), unless we resorted to using bespoke pieces, which would have cost far more than a vBulletin licence (in terms of time and/or money).

vBulletin has a lot of 'social networking' features - it is now possible to have your own photo albums and collections or create 'social groups, also there are hacks such as vBookie and the actual software is (so far) easy to customise (not least in the amount of community support out there). The moderation tools are also far more advanced than those of SMF and it was becoming increasingly clear that we needed to have more options at our disposal.

Our overall aim is to develop the site in many ways, not only as a coaching resource and discussion forum but also in terms of developing a community. To do that we need the best tools available and to be able to move with the times (and quickly). We want to integrate all forms of media into the site (more use of video and photos for starters) as well as being able to add 'extras' as and when needed, which, vBulletin should hopefully allow.

There is still a lot of work to be done in bringing the site up to a level where we'd feel it was even 75% complete but new things are being added daily, it's just that at the moment a lot of them are very much 'behind the scenes'. Visible hacks to users are coming very shortly (next few days or so) but these things have to be tested first in an effort to minimise any downtime.
 
Re: sC's decision to go vB

Thanks for your time there Mas/Tom/AA (What is it these days? :p)

Yeh, i do agree with the vB. I think i said that once upon a time, but i'd be nice to see a vBookie installed, it would mean bets etc. and more discussion could take place.

The socialising side sounds good, it'd also give people like Dave the chance to put photo's and blogs all in his profile. It'd mean its easier to locate etc.

Cheers again.
 
Re: sC's decision to go vB

SMF was good enough for us when we started; it has a good set of features, nice mods and its free. I was aware that our needs would grow with the community, and I expected SMF to catch up with vBulletin by that time. Unfortunately, SMF 2.0 still hasn't been released(a beta version is available though) and feature improvements are mainly targetted towards the administrators/moderators rather than the users. There are quite a few mods which add the missing functionality in SMF but vBulletin has a lot more features out of the box than a heavily modded SMF. The fantastic mods available for vBulletin take it miles ahead of SMF. I've always thought vBulletin is the best forum software out there but just wasn't sure if it was worth purchasing for us since we make nothing from the site. The new features in vB 3.7 convinced us to purchase it.

The mods like vBookie will be installed soon. We are running it pretty much out of the box currently but we don't plan to do so for long.
 
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