vBulletin vs phpBB

[ronoxQ]

More mods != better;
More mods ~= less standard features;

Let me rephrase this. phpBB has mods that do things vbulletin CAN'T do. Must we nitpick?

Flawed != Applicable. Ask anyone in the scientific community, and you will be told that can't use flawed data.

FOR ME, phpbb.com loads faster than vBulletin.com, to this day. This occurs both on a 56k modem and broadband. My computer runs Windows XP, and I test using IE 6, IE 7, and Fx 2.0.

Next off, with vB your site is taken more seriously (imo!) becayuse you paid for it.

Most users don't look at the forum software, you know. YOU look at it, because you're a developer, but my users still can't tell what forum I'm using. I switched from vBulletin to Drupal for a week to repair vB, and they didn't say a thing.

vB has a lot more moderating options, and has a wysig editor (pretty much something that makes it really easy for users to post).

phpBB has tinyMCE integration: the best WYSI I've found online. It's all in how you look at things.

I have signed up at phpBB sites and vB sites...my expeirence is better at vB sites.

That's a flawed view. The world's largest Nazi sites use vBulletin. Conversely, I'm a moderator at a large start-up company that uses phpBB, and it's a pretty amazing site.


Remember: I'm a vBulletin user myself. I haven't used phpBB for a year, since I've found that it's not as efficient as other free software, and because I have vBulletin for when I want to be gaudy. Nonetheless, I hate people getting one-sided views of an argument, so I shall play devil's advocate as long as this goes on. I do the same in reverse on phpBB.com, don't worry.

[Reeve of Shinra]

This thread is from 2002.... in the end, its about choosing the software that best fits your needs and hopefully has the flexibility to allow to you grow.

[Zachery]

phpBB has mods that do things vbulletin CAN'T do.

Such as?

[feldon23]

Most of the mods for phpBB are built into vBulletin.

[ravencr]

I hope this isn't the wrong place to ask this, but how do I install VB on the same server and transfer over my existing information from phpbb without messing things up?

Chris

[feldon23]

I hope this isn't the wrong place to ask this, but how do I install VB on the same server and transfer over my existing information from phpbb without messing things up?

Chris

The instructions in the vBulletin 3.6 Import forum and in the User Manual apply to your situation.

Just make sure you don't MERGE any users until you are completely done importing all users, PMs, threads, posts, forums, etc.

Avatars often won't come in. There is a script which will grab some of them. See my post elsewhere on the 3.6 Import forum.

[ravencr]

So, after I buy it, will it tell me exactly how to install it, where to install it, how to migrate over from phpbb, etc? Or, do I need to spend a bunch of time on here learning about it first?

Chris

[feldon23]

I read this topic, followed the steps, and it worked:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=116398

[ravencr]

Thanks! I'll do it tonight.

Chris

[dilldogs]

vbulletin is the best software going today. Look at all the new options compared to SMF, PHPBB or any of the other forum softwares out there.

Look at the support. I am not the smartest person in the world and anyone that help me a couple of years ago when I first start out with vbulletin knows, When it come to the internet I didn't know an HTTP from a ford,lol... In other word I didn't know crap. But working with vbulletin and their support and what they showed me, I do my own installation of vbulletin and all its modifications.


I have tried SMF and It's not a party to operate,lol...

So I would have to tell you that vb is the best.

[TheElf]

phpBB, Snitz Forums 2000 and the other open source community forums are the ones liest likely to dissapear.

Why?

If Jelsoft dies. vBulletin dies. Even if there is still demand for the product.

If the development/support staff leaves phpbb, or snitz then other members of the community will step up to bat. You can't kill GPL software as long as their is a demand for it.

In my experience it is different
Why? When people seen that phpBB gets endless delays with 2.2 then the branch gets renamed to phpbb3 and still more delays, did others step up, and make a new version happen with some important features built in? Did it end up by their team integrating functions from popular mods (in team with mod authors) to make your experience better? No.

phpBB development, for many years, was practically vanished, and when security holes were found they disputed them to the point where many soft blacklisted their software. Is it good to depend on such team? After the 2nd such incident, when patching is still costly in terms of hours (which costs if you think about it) after years, I somehow doubt that GPL means the software will stay maintainable at reasonable effort.

GPL means one thing: While vBulletin saves you money if you develop comercial products that depends on it, you can't make or sell products tha depends on GPL software without making your software GPL (and free) as well, GPL is as free as North Korea, where one central authority decides what freedoms you have. If think usage of products isn't determined by what you buy, or by free market but by a central authority you can vouch for stalinism and GPL. If you don't that is another story.

And this is why you don't see many people steping out to continue the development of a such software: Because their boss sees what can be done and what can't be, they see how FSF decided to suggest using GPL code and forcing your boss (and employeer) to release their work for free (and lose the invested money, the money they paid for your wages) and they don't sign up for such commie agenda, and many companies won't touch phpBB.

If a company would die and they have a product and there is market demand for that product, people WILL try to buy it, since it earns them money, and it is a safe and reasonable investment.

The difference between free software with BSD licence and free software with GPL is like the difference between charity and stalinism. Sadly the people behind GPL tends to make interesting posts on mailing lists, news groups of other open source software, stating they don't want to support anything that doesn't adhere to their ideology, and they stated they see no problems with suggesting to use an ineffective GPL software over anything that isn't copyleft, and isn't above portraying a weaker choice as better to spread their ideology. Such behavior on part of FSF and seeing quite a few examples at how GPL can end up badly makes me prefer to avoid depending too much on GPL software.

Of course noone cares about what will happen with a software if you can migrate to something else for a reasonable cost, for this your dependency on hacks and modifications should be minimal, since a nonstandard feature set might make any conversion and migration hard.

While with vBulletin I have the liberty to choose which forum software is best for me, and can convert and migrate easily if anything better comes out, and this makes my own site "future proof", a phpBB user who needs mods would see many problems with migrating, and it would make it uneconomical, so would end up in a vendor lock in. Free to use the product with potentially worse and worse conditions.

Of course in the hosting bussiness, or in hardware business GPL is good: you don't pay a cent to give something to the customer and if problems happen it isn't you who would get blamed. And we know a few companies who always loved such alternatives.

Let me rephrase this. phpBB has mods that do things vbulletin CAN'T do. Must we nitpick?
...
phpBB has tinyMCE integration: the best WYSI I've found online. It's all in how you look at things.

RonoxQ: While I am sure we don't have dancing phpBB icon mod, I am sure we have many good mods for vBulletin and many people who care to code stuff if there is need for it, some would do it for free (to help each other about) and some would do it for money.

If you prefer tinyMCE, I am glad that you are happy with it, the sad problem is, tinyMCE creates HTML code, the trick with vBulletin is that you don't need to allow HTML to use a WYSIWYG editor, which is good for the security of your board.

When we speak about features, we should only speak about features we can safely use without creating risks for ourselves. Problematic updates, problematic migrations, security holes, incompatibility between hacks and products...

[SSandgirls]

I spent 2 years using phpbb2.x ..... Have been using VBulletin for 12 months, my only regret is that I didnt move to VBulletin sooner.

I feel so spoilt with VB, not having to manually update and replace code in php files every time a new phpbb version comes out ( which was constantly). My phpBB forum was heavily modded since out of the box it did hardly anything..... VB has all the features I needed as standard plus more...

and the VB support is superb..... Ive not seen support like that....

My site runs faster in general.... The biggest thing I noticed is that I only used a third of the daily bandwidth with VB also..... I went from 28 gig monthly bandwidth ( phpbb) to 9 gig...(VB) with same number of stats.

There really is no comparison ......

[Vtec44]

I have a phpBB3 board, a SMF board, and 3 vB boards. phpBB3 is simplistic where vB is extremely flexible. Each script has its purpose but there's no way to really compare the two without being biased. I, however, will be more than happy to buy another 2 vB licenses because I will gain back the money almost instantly.

I'm also curious to see what mods phpBB has that vB doesn.

[Eric33]

Well I'm still gathering information about Forums, how to build, and all that, so I really don't know yet. However I played around with the CSS of a free PhPBB3 board, and you have to modify code manually to change color, font..anything.

I noticed in the vB demo that it has an editor panel that EASILY lets you change things about the board without ever digging into the CSS file at all. Oh and it's reversible if you screw up, lol

I find vB a lot easier to change around...color ect.. and truthfully I like the function, and smoothness better. VB is my board whenever I get my board functional..

PhPBB is ok, but it's to complicated for me... I just want to have as free maintenance board as possible... I don't want to spend hours a day refining it.