message boards

[Kat]

Many of the visitors to my site have recently been asking me to add a message board, so in an effort to keep 'em happy, that's just what I'm going to do...

I was going to use UBB by Infopop, but I noticed that Sitepoint's is powered by vBulletin...

Does anyone have any comments on the pros and cons to the two boards? Any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance...

[Elledan]

Well, speaking from experience, I must say that vBulletin has more features and is really fast, but since most bulletin boards work quite good, it's more the price of it that you should look at and the sort of scripts that you can run (PHP, ASP etc.) since vBulletin for example, is a PHP BB.

[Hierophant]

vBulletin costs less, is easier to maintain, easier to customize and faster than UBB.

This was also talked about in another thread on this site. You can see it here:
http://www.sitepointforums.com/showt...?threadid=9154

You can also check out the vBulletin support forums. Most current vBulletin users have converted from UBB because UBB just couldn't handle the volume and the number of users.

[prequel]

i have to recommend vbulletin as well ... fast, cheaper, more customisable and alot more addictive for members than UBB -> http://animeboards.net/forums/

[Hierophant]

Definately more addictive.

[mjames]

Make sure your site is doing good as far as traffic goes before you add a message board. The same goes for a chatroom. People get negative thoughts when they see an empty board/chatroom.

My recommendations:

http://www.vbulletin.com - the best, if you are willing to pay for it and install it

http://www.ezboard.com - the best FREE one that is like UBB/vBulletin, but has a few ads and is hosted on another server

[prequel]

Originally posted by wluke
Definately more addictive.

yes INDEED

[TWTCommish]

I personally have yet to think of one advantage that UBB has over vBulletin...nothing comes to mind, unless you do not have access to PHP and MySQL.

[Kat]

Just found out that my server (Earthlink) can't handle vBulletin...major bummer!

[TWTCommish]

Most ISP's are fairly crappy when it comes to webhosting. Bell Atlantic doesn't offer PHP, MySQL, or even Perl! These days though you can get a webhost amazingly cheap anyway with all 3 of those things, and a lot more disk space I'm sure.

[Michel V]

Originally posted by mjames86
My recommendations:

http://www.vbulletin.com - the best, if you are willing to pay for it and install it

http://www.ezboard.com - the best FREE one that is like UBB/vBulletin, but has a few ads and is hosted on another server

Oh, don't recommend EzBoards please... they #@#@#@#@ so much. And they're definitely not customizable.

For a free bulletin board, there's still BoardPower. And it only requires that you know where your Perl is, like /usr/bin/perl/ ... So far i haven't seen any advantages in registering UBB since 1. it's too expensive, and 2. BoardPower has all the functions for free. Also, all CGI files reside in a /boardpower/ directory, so they don't come and play around with your cgi-bin directory (and of course you can rename the /boardpower/)

OK, i admit it, they paid me 100 bucks to advertise for them... j/k.

[KeithMcL]

Now Boardpower have released a MySQL version and are in the process of developing a PHP and MySQl version.

Might be an idea to wait for PHPBulletin to be released.

Personally I still think there's no other BB available that's better than vBulletin.

later

P.S Nearly at the Sitepoint Evangelist marker

[Michel V]

PHPBulletin ? Sounds interesting, i just hope it won't be in that damned php4, because my host still doesn't support it, only php3.

[TWTCommish]

PHPBulletin definetly looks interesting. Matt is still working on it (not the Matt that runs SP)...

If you can't wait for it, however, you can go with "tForum"...run a search on HotScripts.com for it. It's a freeware PHP/SQL board.

[mjames]

Originally posted by Shin Ma

Originally posted by mjames86
My recommendations:

http://www.vbulletin.com - the best, if you are willing to pay for it and install it

http://www.ezboard.com - the best FREE one that is like UBB/vBulletin, but has a few ads and is hosted on another server

Oh, don't recommend EzBoards please... they #@#@#@#@ so much. And they're definitely not customizable.

For a free bulletin board, there's still BoardPower. And it only requires that you know where your Perl is, like /usr/bin/perl/ ... So far i haven't seen any advantages in registering UBB since 1. it's too expensive, and 2. BoardPower has all the functions for free. Also, all CGI files reside in a /boardpower/ directory, so they don't come and play around with your cgi-bin directory (and of course you can rename the /boardpower/)

OK, i admit it, they paid me 100 bucks to advertise for them... j/k.

I beg to pardon, Shin Ma. For being hosted on a remote server, they ARE very cusomtizeable - and they're free. Take a look at what I've done with ezboard here. I've been able to add about anything I want to it...