Feedback on new forums?

Brim, I'll handle this question...

We chose vBulletin because of how robust and proven it is. Major corporations and other large forums use vBulletin for this very reason. Also, it is an extremely secure package. As for phpBB, take a look at the 'security vulnerability' list on many security sites and you'll quickly realize that phpBB is the PHP application with the most security issues and one that is broken into most often.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of Open Source software and all. But when it comes time for me and the rest of the Tech Committee to install something, we need to make sure that the following things are taken into consideration:

1- Will everyone's information be secure?
2- Will the software be able to scale with the large increase of use we are season year after year?
3- Can we count on the forums being up at 3am?
4- Does it offer a robust set of features enabling the team to moderated posts, handle issues, and track problems?
5- Is the application a burden to run by a small team of volunteers.

As such, we went with vBulletin. It meets all our needs and comes with support.

Hope this answers your question.

 

Brim,

The reason the birthday is needed is in order to meet with the current COPPA rules. We need to determine if each of our users is younger or older than 13. Sure, someone can put in any date they want, but in case something happened down the road, we can then go back and state that we asked for the age and the person was dishonest.

Take a look at this page for more information on COPPA:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/coppa.htm

 

Trust me.. there's no FEMA spending going on here The committee discussed this at length and we are very concious of what and how we request budget from the HOA.

On someone else's comments on themes.. I believe more have to be installed before you can choose from them. Please keep chiming in so we have things to look at for improvements for the future.

FYI.. my priorities right now are (flexible of course)

- stable, functioning platform after the move
- proper layout and permissions
- proper board variable settings to our requirements and user desires
- branding of the forum view
- polishing out the customizations users have (icons, themes, etc)
+ whatelse comes up

This list just covers the forum.. not even touches the rest of the website or hosting platform that we have available for use for other Broadland's functions (mailing lists, websites, etc). So there is still lots of fun to be had, and we do our best to deliver what we think people would like to see or have.

Unfortunatly the previous platform's performance had become so miserable, the sooner the move, the better.. so only points 1 and 2 were focused on before we went live.

If you like doing this type of stuff for fun.. please stop by and join us at the Community Center at 7:30 second Tuesday every month. We're always looking for new faces who want to help and play.

 

Brim,

I can't go into details regarding what and how we moved data from the previous forums. If you would like more information and/or discuss this, please feel free to buy a plane ticket back to the Ashburn area and attend our next Tech Committee meeting, held on the 2nd Tuesday of each month (March 14th is our next meeting).

 

the old forum didn't have this capability.. the new one does. Can't import what doesn't exist. Kinda simple

 

Brim,

As I was insinuating in my previous post, let's take this offline please. Thanks.

 

why the desire for .NET Homer?

 

ah.. yes, one of our goals was to move off the Windows host we were on, so no .Net was a + to us Having LAMP will open us up to a number of programs.. and is also the desired platform for alot of the skillsets people on the committe have.

We leverage webservices in .NET at work extensivly.. but I don't code. I just harp the people that do

 

Not anymore. You don't have to be the developers boss to work with them.

Regardless, the company likes the work I do enough that I've been there coming up on 10 years.. so it can't be that bad

 

Dutchml, I don't see you as subscribing to this thread. Since your registered email address is an aol.com address, and we have seen AOL do some strange things with our emails in the past couple days, could it be that the email you got was from before you unsubscribed?
If you're still having issues, send us a Private Message and we'll investigate.

Thanks!