Your message board software

[rickhz]

I hope you don't mind, but I'm just checking out the program and was wondering how it's been working for you.

I want to switch from UBB, but I haven't found many example sites to look at for VB. Any input that you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Rick

http://www.4x4central.com/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi

[JimF]

Hi Rick-

I love the software, though some of the users might not be too thrilled (namely WebTV users). I think everything would have been fine, except I jumped on the new software literally the day it was released. Hindsight tells me I should have waited for some of the bugs to be fixed before I made the transition.

As for the transition itself, it went without a hitch. Everything came over perfectly. I would make a suggestion; make any changes to the templates *before* you import your UBB data; some of the old threads became "askew" when I switched some of the template settings.

The Admin area is INCREDIBLE. Everything is modularized and template based, so you can make it look exactly how you want it to. I made mine to look as much like my UBB as possible. The best part, is that everything is so easy. Most of the hacks I put in were already part of this software, but what isn't here is easily added. It isn't quite as "pretty" as the UBB cp was, but it certainly gets the job done.

Performance is unbeatable. There is no "Update Threads", though I have noticed that you have to reset the forum post counts/last posters whenever you move a topic, but that is instanaeous, unlike UBB which had to cycle through all the forums. Side by side the PHP version blows the Perl version out of the water.

My only advice to you would be to wait until *all* the bugs are worked out. As with any new product, initially there are problems.

This software is everything I wanted out of the UBBEE (aka Open Topic), but was disappointed to see was not going to be provided by Infopop. It gives you TOTAL control over every facet of the software. Moreover, it is extremely easy to TAKE that control.

All and all, I give it a hearty recommendation, with the only factor being that you wait until it is perfected, and also have it running and tested thoroughly on your system, and tweaked to your liking before importing your UBB data and going live with it.

I hope this helps-

[manhattan]

Hi Jim.

I also came by to take a peek at the Vbulletin software in action. I'm a moderator at a website that is doing a very large (>350K posts) upgrade as we speak. Since the upgrade is already underway, it's unfortunately too late to warn the techs about the "templates before import" thing. I hope they did it that way. They might have, since we ran a test with a smaller board first.

At any rate, if it's OK I'd like to share some of your other thoughts with the others in my site administration.

I'll share the URL of the upgraded site when it goes live; it is currently off-line for about 8 hours to do the upgrade. It's not sports oriented, but some of your customers might get a kick out of it.

Your site, on the other hand, is awesome. I'll certainly be coming back and pointing it out to a friend or two if that's OK.

Thanks for your thoughts on Vbulletin.

[JimF]

Here is the URL for one of the messed up posts:

http://forums.bronx-bombers.com/show...p?threadid=514

Though I'm sure that if you have "techs", they'll be able to fix it . 98% of the other old posts came over fine. It only seems to have effected a few of them. Very strange.

The URL to my UBB is http://www.yankeesboard.com/cgi-bin/~Ultimate.cgi There aren't any posts there or anything, but at least you can see how much I have done to make this software look like the UBB software.

Your site, on the other hand, is awesome.

All I can say is thank you! I've put a lot of time and effort into making this site as good as possible, and I still don't feel as if I'm there yet.

Please let me know the addie for your board when you get it up and running .

[JimF]

EDIT...

After messing around with the templates a little bit, all of the sudden that post I linked you to earlier is displaying correctly. So I guess it's not that bad afterall...

[manhattan]

We're up and running.

Hi again. Well, the technical staff was up all night, and they're still up now, but our board is (mostly) converted.

We ran into some rather annoying glitches, but nothing that will kill the boards over the long term. First, one of our prior sins revisited us. Specifically, we had some bad clock settings after earlier resets of our server (a frequent occurence with UBB). Well, all posts that came before we noticed the clock problem moved to their "chronologically correct" part of the thread, so some threads are not in their original order.

Second, the time stamp on many of the posts that were made in the few hours prior to our changeover got advanced several hours.

Third is the really annoying one. The UBB quote tags didn't carry. That is, if someone quoted someone else prior to the changeover, now all one sees is a bunch of html code not working. This is annoying, as our members quoted each other extensively.

Finally one of our more heavily trafficed forums has disappeared entirely, but the technical folks assure all us non-computer types that they will be able to fix this problem.

At any rate, the site is the Straight Dope Message Board, an on-line community comprised mostly of fans of syndicated columnist Cecil Adams. The main page is at http://www.straightdope.com, and the message board is at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/

Stop on by if you get a chance. We're still tweaking it, mostly from a stylistic point of view. Our members are and always have been very vocal about the look and feel and functionality of the site itself. You can find them commenting about it in the forums "About This Message Board" and to a lesser extent in the "BBQ Pit."

Again, thanks for your comments about the conversion.