General questions about vB

[manifesto]

1) In reality, how much different is vB from UBB? It seems to look a lot like it, so are there different features?

2) Is it easy to change stuff in it? I.E. if I wanted to make the subject column larger, and the last post column smaller, is that easy to do?

3) This one's just cause I'm curious, how long has vB been out, and how many people are using it (if you can tell us that).

4) Is it possible to setup vB to autocreate boards for people who register? I.E. if I have a site that offers free boards, do I need to be hounded by emails, or can vB set them up?

5) Would vB or UBB be the best forum to use if I started to get a lot of traffic? I've seen UBB on high traffic sites, but it seems slow. Would vB be any faster?

Thanks.

[Edited by manifesto on 04-23-2000 at 09:31 PM]

[Martin]

1) In reality, how much different is vB from UBB? It seems to look a lot like it, so are there different features?

I haven't bought it yet, but from playing with it, it's a helluva lot more scalable than UBB.
Some of the features offered are hacks that InfoPop will not be offering in the full release, such as going to the right page in a topic when you post, the Last Post By, Page numbering under the title, etc.

2) Is it easy to change stuff in it? I.E. if I wanted to make the subject column larger, and the last post column smaller, is that easy to do?

Again, I haven't played with it, but since everything is template driven, it should be VERY easy to change everything.

3) This one's just cause I'm curious, how long has vB been out, and how many people are using it (if you can tell us that).

It's only been out a few days so far, so not that many sites are using it. (yet)

4) Is it possible to setup vB to autocreate boards for people who register? I.E. if I have a site that offers free boards, do I need to be hounded by emails, or can vB set them up?

This is the second time I've seen this request, and I think it's a good idea, but I wouldn't allow it for the regular release. If you want people to buy you product, why make it so anyone can just join someone else's?
I think that a "Developer's Edition" (or some such name) released with a feature like that would sell big, but I would price it accordingly if it were my program.

5) Would vB or UBB be the best forum to use if I started to get a lot of traffic? I've seen UBB on high traffic sites, but it seems slow. Would vB be any faster?

This program blows UBB away for speed. Look at wandrer's performance tests for the numbers. I'm switching my site to this program next week. We get about 1500-2000 posts/day and I just had to prune several thousand topics yesterday because of the performance problems UBB was giving me.
Plus, this proggie is a few dollars cheaper :)

[John]

1) vB is written in PHP and uses a relational database for posts. This makes it faster. It also runs off templates - very each to customise your board. See this page for more features:
http://www.vbulletin.com/features/

2) Yup - templates are configured through a web based control panel. We are looking to see why the last post column appears so large in netscape.

3) It has been out 5 days. There are about 15 people with boards, although not all are active yet.

4) This would be a hack - it does not offer it by default

5)vB would be faster for a large site I think. Someone has already done a speed comparison:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=83

Just drawing attention to part of the stats:
times are average and do not take into account that the ubb times were on a local dedicated computer while the vbulletin times were over the internet during 'morning rush hour' (not including all the other traffic to this site)..

John

[manifesto]

Cool. As soon as I try out the light version (do you have an eta on when we can dl it?) to make sure it works right on my system I plan on buying it.

[manifesto]

To install this, do I need to have root access to my system, or can I install it on a page that's hosted somewhere, that I only have access to as a normal user?

[Mike Sullivan]

As long as you have a MySQL database at your disposal and PHP, you'll be fine.

[GregCS]

Can this thing use Microsoft SQL 7.0 which is installed on a seperate server??

Thanks

[Martin]

that it only supports mySQL right now, but I can't swear to that.

they do have a new shareware release of mySQL for win23, though...

[vbsquare]

I will be running vBulletin on Windows 2000 soon :) I've got PHP going (but only as a CGI - ISAPI crashes) and it looks as if mySQL is working ok so you should be fine.