Should we upgrade to Vbulletin?

[Winston]

See here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthre ... -vBulletin

I started my forum with phpbb. After migrating to vB after two years, search engine traffic doubled in a few months. This alone is a deciding advantage of vB.

In case any dev reads this: make vB even more SE friendly. Dump some other features if you have to.

That was written back in 2005. Do you think it still applies? If we switch to vbulletin here, would search engine traffic double?

vbulletin forums do seem to show up higher in search engine hits than phpBB forums. Why is that?

[Adama]

What ever this programming is you are using now, it is very user unfriendly. If it isnt too much of a pain, VB would be an awesome upgrade to this site. The way it is now is weird and cumbersome. Certain normal things you would expect are either missing altogether or in odd places.

For example, clicking on someone's name doesnt work. You have to search for the profile button. The time/date stamp is at the bottom of each post instead of the top. So you have to scroll to see how recent the post is. Some other stuff I cant remember.

[momopi]

The most popular online forum on this planet is Gaia Online, and they use a customized version of phpbb. Changing software is not going to magically make your forum more popular. If you want to draw people in, you must have fresh content.

vBulletin now has CMS system, which is quite nice if you actually use it:
http://www.vbulletin.com/index.php?do=screenshots

[Winston]

J.Adama,

Can you list what features you want that are missing? I will try to install them.

Momopi,

But there is fresh content on this board everyday. Isn't that enough? What other content is needed?

So you don't think at this point, that changing to VB is going to make much of a difference in search engine optimization?

Maybe that was true in 2005. This forum software is from 2006. It may not be the latest, but it is very functional at least.

[Winston]

Should we upgrade to Vbulletin? See an overview of the features it has here:

https://www.vbulletin.com

However, I remember that once you bought their forum software, you had a lifetime license. Now it seems that their license expires. I don't know why. I wrote their support about it. Did they change their policy for the worse?

Also, their new 4.0 theme looks very nice and has similar colors to this forum. I would be cool with that. See these screenshots here:

https://www.vbulletin.com/index.php?do=screenshots

However, the admin panel looks very tedious to use, as you can see from the screen shots above. The one I have here is very easy to use and figure out, even for new mods.

What do you all think?

Anyway, this is what their new default theme looks like. It's quite nice, don't you think?

[Blue Murder]

Doesn't matter to me 'cos I'll be gone, but this and Zetaboards are good ideas. Note: This is the sixth time I've said it now, but yes -- a change would be nice. I'd prefer Zetaboards over Vbulletin, but either of the two over the current engine.