[QUOTE=gaydemon;88458]Thanks! Your comment about vBulletin very much sums up my own feelings about it.
The problems with moderation on Buddy Press worries me though, it woudl be for and adult site. But I do pay a monthly subscription to WPMU who offers some good plugins for both Buddy Press and Word Press.[/QUOTE]
If you have a subscription to WPMU you should be fine Bjorn, there are a lot of good plugins on there that i’ve been looking at. they even have one for a membership payment option. I don’t know if they have a decent CMS plugin on there but I’m sure they do, as well as a good moderation plugin. Overall I think buddypress is the way to go for this.
Thing is, every major community form I encounter seems to be based on vBulletin. Well, not Webmaster World or Google’s new forum, but they’re hand written so not really in the same league as the others… All three of the gay webmaster forums are on vBulletin, GFY is on vBulletin, then there’s JUB, Web Hosting Talk, Digital Point, even niche ones like VWVortex for VW enthusiasts. When you look at the world’s biggest forum sites - of the top 20, 6 are custom or unknown, 6 are vBulletin, 4 are phpBB, and the others are based on other technologies. Actually they say VWVortex isn’t vBulletin, when it is, so that gives vBulletin at least 7 or the top 20. Looking at the next 20, 14 of them are vBulletin, in the next 20, 12 are vBulletin, and so on…
Conversely, when I run across unsuccessful forums they seem to be based on things other than vBulletin. Maybe it’s the financial commitment - people who are serious about having their sites succeed don’t mind shelling out some money…
So yeah, it’s a pain in the ass, but you get used to it and it’s an industry standard users are accustomed to.
True enough. I should have clarified by stating I was referring to the vBulletin suite they have. It has all the features one could want for a social networking site the only problem is it skins horribly. and the examples you can find of the vBulletin suite skinned look horrible. I suppose with a bit of hard work you could produce something that looks great but I’ve yet to see anyone actually manage to do that.
[QUOTE=rawTOP;88472]Thing is, every major community form I encounter seems to be based on vBulletin. Well, not Webmaster World or Google’s new forum, but they’re hand written so not really in the same league as the others… All three of the gay webmaster forums are on vBulletin, GFY is on vBulletin, then there’s JUB, Web Hosting Talk, Digital Point, even niche ones like VWVortex for VW enthusiasts. When you look at the world’s biggest forum sites - of the top 20, 6 are custom or unknown, 6 are vBulletin, 4 are phpBB, and the others are based on other technologies. Actually they say VWVortex isn’t vBulletin, when it is, so that gives vBulletin at least 7 or the top 20. Looking at the next 20, 14 of them are vBulletin, in the next 20, 12 are vBulletin, and so on…
Conversely, when I run across unsuccessful forums they seem to be based on things other than vBulletin. Maybe it’s the financial commitment - people who are serious about having their sites succeed don’t mind shelling out some money…
So yeah, it’s a pain in the ass, but you get used to it and it’s an industry standard users are accustomed to.[/QUOTE]
Of course it’s most common used Forum, but I’m looking for something to replicate Facebook / Twitter style profiles.
vBulletin does works great as a forum, no real competition there. But when it comes to try and make vBulletin to do anything else it’s just not that easy and I’ve yet to see anything that looks good. vBulletin always looks like vBulletin. And you got to admit they screwed up the Profile pages big time since Version 4!
Yes and it would only work until their next release when they suddenly decide that they want to change absolutely everything. So far each upgrade I’ve done has lead to 2 days worth of trying to fix problems it’s introduced to the template system. Where as when Word Press does upgrades it takes me a few minutes to fix the templates.