I am getting ready to setup a forum/guild site for my SWTOR guild and I am evaluating different PHP based forums and was curious what the admins of this forum have thought about IP Boards that they use.
Have you used others?
I will probably end up going the SMF or phpBB just because they are free, but I have been considering paid forums like vBulletin or IP Boards.
I currently already my own cloud server running so I will be self hosting the forum and not using a hosted service.
We've used IPBoards for years and it's been really easy to maintain and admin. I think we had a vBulletin board before this one, but I can't remember. Atomm can probably give you a better idea of the setup costs/issues though.
I have done PHPbb and SMF. I found I was spending A LOT of time with phpbb trying to keep it up to date and clean from hackers and still losing. I took that one down due the amount of admin-ing it took.
The SMF was during one of their early iterations as I recall. They had chnaged their name from some previous software. I found it was just that, it felt rather clunky and not very well refined. This was several years back. Due to this, I closed the board.
After these two tries, I asked the group to finance IP Boards (due to my good experience admin-ing here), they balked at having a cost (as I recall a rather reasonable cost) and thus the forum aspect went away completely.
My experience here has shown the IP board to be nice. There are certainly security issues here and there, but it seems much less attacked than others. Atomm runs the true DB and installation functions here, we only help admin users and threads. Honestly I beleive most of the time we are running at least a version old and have few/no troubles.
I don't know that I have played with vbulletin, but my impression is that it is a touch more refined from my use of it on some forums where I am a member. I have played with soem other, but I would be hardpressed to tell you what...
Bubbaspanky wrote:I don't know that I have played with vbulletin, but my impression is that it is a touch more refined from my use of it on some forums where I am a member. I have played with soem other, but I would be hardpressed to tell you what...
We started out running PhpBB and it was a nightmare. It was a CPU hog and we were constantly fighting the hackers and spammers off. I gave up and bought IPB. As Sarge said, we are a bit behind on versions, but I'm still happy with it.
If I had it to do all over again, I would just set up Wordpress with Buddypress and one of the small WP Boards if needed.
If you ever need hosting, let me know. I've got plenty of horsepower on this dedicated box and don't mind sharing. BTW, write something up on your thoughts on SWTOR in the gaming section. I'd love to hear about it.
No problem. What kind of client site stuff do you do?
I use to build sites for clients and host them for a fee, but I found that people who don't know what they want tend to blame you for everything, including their own stupidity. I had to give it up at that point.
Atomm wrote:No problem. What kind of client site stuff do you do?
I use to build sites for clients and host them for a fee, but I found that people who don't know what they want tend to blame you for everything, including their own stupidity. I had to give it up at that point.
My business partner and I do Drupal sites for small businesses. We basically setup a drupal site with either a premade theme or custom theme we design and set it all up and train them on how to update their own website content. I am really excited, we just setup a contract with the US Olympic Committee to handle a bunch of their sites...just waiting on their red tape to get resolved.
I have found if they maintain their own content they soon realize the value in the high cost of me handling it for them.
We also do custom web based applications, ie I built a image search for a Recorder's Office for a Missouri County. They had the database, but needed to give their clients (title companies) a way to search and retrieve online so we built them a web front end that serves up the document scans and tracks all of it.
Most of our clients are just small businesses wanting to get a web presence up ASAP with a simple Quote form, so we show them what we setup with a demo drupal site and they are usually sold on it.
Congrats on the Olympic committee stuff. That's awesome.
I tried to position myself as a cheap solution. I think that was my first mistake. It seems the less you charge people, the harder they are to work for. I had two partners, but they weren't upholding their part either. Yea, I'm a bit jaded doing web work for pay now days. :-)
yeah, that's why we went the content management system route and charge a premium for basic hosting...most clients realize how much work it actually is and either don't mess with it or end up paying me $75-$150 per page I create for them.
Custom design is really where I make decent money. A basic logo will run ~$300 (depending on my mood) and then complete site designs from scratch will be upwards of $1k. All of this varies client to client and what I "think" they can afford.