Forum Software

If I offered my time and a little money to purchase InvisionPowerBoard (IP would you guys accept my support in archiving the existing forum and starting a much more user friendly forum?

I find this forum to be way behind the times and I know there is already a ton of priceless information on these forums. However, it's very difficult to keep up with new topics and ongoing discussions.

I have years of experience managing an IP board for www.zwaveworld.com/forum and I would like to offer my help so that we can make this community a much better medium for sharing our ideas.

I'll run this past the core team.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

or just transfer this one into a phpbb forum, since phpbb is free and pretty well covered with multiple add-ons.

As I mentioned earlier a pricey but very effective forum software is vbulletin since it offers a lot of useful hacks (much more than phpbb) to provide all sorts of addons like different download databases for parts to print for example.

I don't know whether invision uses hooks for database code addons (vBulletin style) or the hacks have to be hardcoded to the source (phpbb style) so that might be something to keep in mind for future hacks that should be added, since I guess some would need to be added for downloads (software like the python script or "hardware" like stls and such) and maybe changed to fit our specific needs.

'sid

The reason I suggested Invision is because it's what I am use to using and it has been rock solid so far. It's pretty modular and fairly secure from spam bots. I don't like phpBB which is why I don't use it. It just seems very poorly designed and filled with bugs and hacks. vBulletin is nice as well but I simply don't have the experience with it like I do with IPB.

The only reason I did not recommend transfering data is because it would require some type of script to be written to port this database over to a different database layout. I honestly don't know enough about the database structures of either database to pull this off on my own and I doubt there are any scripts already written to go from Phourm to IPB or Phourm to vBulletin. I will take a look though just in case there are.

Even though there is a lot of good information on this forum we have come a long way and there is also a lot of old data on this forum that we could live without. This is why I suggested to just close this forum and make it read only. Any recent threads could be restarted and summarized by the original author. It would not take much time at all for people to start participating and fill the forum back up.

I love vBulletin I must admit and I am what you would call an experienced administrator I'd say.
But it's unfortunately not cheap, so that's the downside.

I know how to convert almost any sql database to a vBulletin readable too.
Although I'm pretty sure there IS a script that does convert from phorum to vBulletin already (I think I've read something about phorum on vborg can't remember)

In fact the old data is what we have as a value, in my opinion it's pretty important to keep at least the majority of what we have right now.

Oh and phpbb is pretty good, there are some features I miss, but it's free software and what's missing can be added if it's important enough
But true if there's a way I'd prefere vBulletin

'sid

Personally I think its important to keep to open source software. Even if someone is generous enough to donate to buy software, it makes the project dependent on them. I think it is more important to shift a lot of posts to a wiki system. This also has the advantage of not needing major upheaval, as the move can be done gradually.

Someone go trough all the forums and put them on wiki if they have value?