A few questions before buying

[mightymorse]

I would like to set up discussion forums for the employees of my company -- it will be on our intranet only, for approx. 70 users. I initially looked at some of the free solutions (e.g. phpBB) because I thought our needs were not very extensive. But I have discovered that some of our desired features are not available in these. Odd things we're interested in:

• Ability to post via email. Perhaps this is counter to the point of a BB, but we would like for employees who are at home to be able to send an email that will show up in the company intranet BB (as opposed to logging into our network remotely to post via browser). I've seen this with blogging software, but not BB software.
• Ability to see which users have read a thread or post. This may sound ridiculous for a public BB that may have thousands of users, but for our purpose it is helpful to know if so-and-so has seen this topic. Info on "last visited" for a user would also work.

Also, is using vBulliten for a community of just 70 users akin to going after a mouse with a bazooka? Is it overkill?

Thanks,
Jason

[Colin F]

First of, you can use vBulletin for any amount of users. While it's built to be extendable, you can turn on and off most options to adjust it to your situation. A smaller board wouldn't have to worry as much about server load so it could turn on additional options (for example similiar threads).

To your other posts:
It currently isn't possible to post via email. I made a modification that allows this, but it is currently in a beta state, so I can't guarantee that it'll work.

The only information that's available is when the user last visited. This doesn't have to mean he read any new threads.

[mightymorse]

Thanks.
Another question: As I mentioned, I have about 70 users that I would add, and then not allow registrations. Any further user additions would be done by admin. So:
1. Will it be reasonably easy to add a list of defined users and related profile info?(perhaps imported from a text file, or added using a query in phpmyadmin?)
2. Can I turn off registrations after this?