Mods

[TheLastLegion]

How fast is the loading time? Does it support GZIP? Is there an adavantage to using GZIP on a large community or is it even recommended using it for a large community with about 16,000 posts?

For mods on vbulletin such as shop, points, arcade are they free to download/install or must we pay for them?

Do you offer a inventory of free template with the purchase?

[Andy Huang]

Depending on mod complexity, there could be potential affects to the preformance; however, this is generally negelectable.

Base vBulletin product have built in gzip support; and you can override this option and preform gzip globally via other controls (apache/.htaccess/etc.) gzip preformance and bandwidth saving varies based on different compression levels being used.

Most mods and templates are free when you find them on vBulletin.org; what other developers/designer decide to charge for their product/service, however, would be out of your own pocket.

[feldon23]

Realize that GZIP actually increases server load. I have it on because especially for dialup users, my forum loads much faster. But if my forum gets bogged down, I turn it off. I wish vBulletin had a graceful degradation feature where if server load is detected above a certain value like 5, it would disable search, who's online, and gzip, amongst other performance-robbing features.