Hello from a future buyer

[MrHorror]

Hi, allow me to tell you a bit about our situation. I am looking to buy a vbulletin license sometime within the next week. Looking at downloading version 3.8.2. I was recently on ipbfree beginning in August of 2009. As of August 2009, me and my moderators had just finished up getting our IPBFREE site up, running, skinned perfectly, etc. Then, this past July...the 15th, IPBFREE was shut down by some sort of government gag order. To this day, no one in the IPBFREE community has been told why the shutdown occured. Just that they were ordered to shut down all of the forums, and were legally binded to not speak about the issue.

So then we moved on to jcink. But despite trying out numerous designs and stuff, we're still not happy with the look of the forum. So we're moving to vbulletin. As for our host, we've decided to host the forum on bytehost. Their 5000+ mb of disk space and 200GB of bandwith a month will be good for our horror film forum. Considering we're gonna be starting from about 30 or so members (once the regs all sign back up), and beyond posts, threads, traffic, and stuff, we're not gonna have a huge hog of resources on our forum. We're probably gonna try and hook up a blog like Joomla to vbulletin, rather than using a vbulletin blog.


And we're not gonna have our own personal avatar gallery, but rather let members choose their own avatars from whereever they find them. Also I will regularly let members know to keep their IM boxes clean of too many messages and I will regularly be deleting threads that are older than two years and don't have many replies. So anyways, that's my story. We have never used vbulletin before so I hope this set up thing once we get it downloaded isn't too hard. I hope to have the forum uploaded, skinned, and everything ready to go by December 10th at the latest.

[feldon23]

As for our host, we've decided to host the forum on bytehost. Their 5000+ mb of disk space and 200GB of bandwith a month will be good for our horror film forum. Considering we're gonna be starting from about 30 or so members (once the regs all sign back up), and beyond posts, threads, traffic, and stuff, we're not gonna have a huge hog of resources on our forum.

And we're not gonna have our own personal avatar gallery, but rather let members choose their own avatars from whereever they find them.

Also I will regularly let members know to keep their IM boxes clean of too many messages and I will regularly be deleting threads that are older than two years and don't have many replies.

I think you'll be surprised how little space a forum takes up.

On my forum of 2,500 members, avatars take up about 5MB. I allow my users virtually unlimited private messaging and it's only about 7MB of data for all the PMs. My forum which has been open for 9 years all told takes up 1.3GB of data, the vast majority of that being photo attachments. With 5,000 MB of space and starting out with 30 members, you shouldn't have to put any kind of restrictions on them for avatars or attachments. Anyway, out-of-the-box, vBulletin doesn't support off-site avatars. You would have to install a plugin.

So anyways, that's my story. We have never used vbulletin before so I hope this set up thing once we get it downloaded isn't too hard. I hope to have the forum uploaded, skinned, and everything ready to go by December 10th at the latest.

Best of luck to you! I will say once you are hosting your own forum, instead of being dependent upon third parties, it is very liberating.

[beishe8]

Hello to a future buyer !

Free forum hosts are good to start your own forum.
With your new vB forum you won't have fears for shutting them down.
Backup regularly.
All the best!

[MrHorror]

I think you'll be surprised how little space a forum takes up.

On my forum of 2,500 members, avatars take up about 5MB. I allow my users virtually unlimited private messaging and it's only about 7MB of data for all the PMs. My forum which has been open for 9 years all told takes up 1.3GB of data, the vast majority of that being photo attachments. With 5,000 MB of space and starting out with 30 members, you shouldn't have to put any kind of restrictions on them for avatars or attachments. Anyway, out-of-the-box, vBulletin doesn't support off-site avatars. You would have to install a plugin.


Best of luck to you! I will say once you are hosting your own forum, instead of being dependent upon third parties, it is very liberating.

Thanks for the well wishes! Right, I was reading this here about vbulletin:


For example, an installation that has 5,800+ members, 40,000 threads, 662,000 posts, 70,000 private messages and 8,000 attachments has approx. a total MySQL database size of 940MB - which comes to around 140MB per 100,000 posts. Please note that it does vary from forum to forum, so your mileage may vary.



I had started off with a proboards forum way back in 2004, and at our peak, we had 696 members, 17,000+ topics, and 28,000+ total posts. This includes a huge news archive and upcoming horror films database which I still update regularly to this day. We were on that forum for five years, before we migrated over to ipbfree, and turned the proboards forum into a film database/news archiver.

About images/off site avatars, so you're saying vbulletin doesn't have a user cp option where you could browse your personal folder, and just upload an image from there as your avatar? But it does have an option where you could upload an image at like imageshack or tinypic, and then just paste the url into a box for your avatar right?


Also does version 3.8.2 have an option where you can add tags to threads, and also where you can add a thread to facebook, twitter, stumbleupon, myspace etc, using icons located within the thread?

[MrHorror]

Hello to a future buyer !

Free forum hosts are good to start your own forum.
With your new vB forum you won't have fears for shutting them down.
Backup regularly.
All the best!

Yeah the IPBFREE situation was really a blindside issue. It just came out of total nowhere. We had no time to inform members of any shutdown, or got no notice. I just visited the forum on 7/15 and it was gone. Strangely enough, at the same time IPBFREE got taken down by mysterious forces...so did bloggetry. But bloggetry since then has been put back online. As of about September I think.

[feldon23]

About images/off site avatars, so you're saying vbulletin doesn't have a user cp option where you could browse your personal folder, and just upload an image from there as your avatar? But it does have an option where you could upload an image at like imageshack or tinypic, and then just paste the url into a box for your avatar right?

Just the opposite.

Users can pick avatars from a gallery (since you run a Horror site I could imagine a really cool gallery of preset avatsrs), or they can upload GIF or JPG files from their PC. The only thing they can't do is use avatars from imageshack, etc.

[MrHorror]

Just the opposite.

Users can pick avatars from a gallery (since you run a Horror site I could imagine a really cool gallery of preset avatsrs), or they can upload GIF or JPG files from their PC. The only thing they can't do is use avatars from imageshack, etc.

Ah I see. Well as long as members can upload gifs from their own pc that's terrific. Me and the mods might create an avatar gallery but it all depends on how much we think people will use it or not.