New Forum Software

[David]

New forum software

We have just moved all of our forums from a software package called PHPBB to a new package called vBulletin. This should allow easier mangement for us and allow a few new features like a better editor for writing posts.

Hopefully this won't cause too much disruption.

If you do notice anything wrong or missing, please let me know.

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David

[David]

Why we changed to VBulletin

After many months of procrastination we have finally moved our forums from PHPBB2 to VBulletin.

When we first installed PHPBB, some years back, we thought PHPBB was a wonderful piece of software. A shinning example of everything that was good about open source software. But as time went by the Internet become a less friendly place and people started to abuse the support forums we provided via PHPBB for our software.

The abuse reached the point where for every real forum user that registered, we were getting 10 bogus users signing up as well. This in turn meant that we were spending more and more time deleting not so subtlety disguised posts about Viagra, Casinos, etc. Plus a lot of the bogus users were just opening accounts to get a link back to their spammy web site sites.

PHPBB just wasn't up to the job in this new world. In particular There was no bulk user filter and delete function, and the anti-spam measures were easily being circumnavigated. So we started applying custom mods to PHPBB, directly editing data in the database, banning domain names, etc... But then when we needed to upgrade PHPBB, to fix the regular security issues, we needed to reapply some of our custom code and retest it, if we had time.

In short it was becoming a maintenance nightmare. We were holding out for PHPBB3, but the development of PHPBB had become glacially slow without a release timeline. A common story for Opensorce software (but understandable, as no one is being paid to work on it).

So this afternoon we switched to VBulletin. The move was pretty smooth. It took about 4 hours to move the core part of the forum over. But we are still making template changes and minor tweaks now, so all up I think it will be about 6 hours of work. Hopefully we'll get that that back in time saved over the next month.

With just a single click we were able to delete several hundred users who had signed up but never made a post. We were able to import all of our old posts using the Impex tool and even get most of our 1000 or so incoming Google links redirected to the new Vb forum using the 404.php script. Nice!

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David