Pre-purchase Questions

[modelsys]

I've very interested in purchasing vBulletin, it looks great! I've just got a few questions that can hopefully be answered. These are the features I'm looking for, can anyone tell me if vBulletin can do these:

I would like all of my forums to be private. Possible?
People to sign-up by filling in a registration form and a notification sent to an admin email address advising that new users are awaiting validation. The admin can then either approve them or deny them. Possible?
Some people will have access to all forums, other people may only have access to one or two forums. Possible?

How does vBulletin keep track of which messages are new? Does it only flag new threads or also new messages within old threads?

How often are updates / bug fixes released?

I did try sending these questions to sales@vbulletin.com on 2nd of August, but nobody bothered replying. I hope the after-sales support isn't as slack as the pre-sales support! :)

[Martin]

I would like all of my forums to be private. Possible?

you can set up the board so unregistered people can't even read the topics. each forum can be private and access resrticted to certain people.

People to sign-up by filling in a registration form and a notification sent to an admin email address advising that new users are awaiting validation. The admin can then either approve them or deny them. Possible?

Yes. That's built in.


Some people will have access to all forums, other people may only have access to one or two forums. Possible?

Yes, but it's a little tricky right now. You have to set up usergroups and assign forums to each usergroup, then assign the members to the particular usergroup that you want them in. It's a sort of a mess right now, but John is supposed to be working on it.

How does vBulletin keep track of which messages are new? Does it only flag new threads or also new messages within old threads?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. vB uses cookies and when you leave the board and come back, all topics, new or old with new replies, are flagged with a different colored icon from the ones that have no new messages in them.
It does not, however, keep track of what you have and have not read already.

How often are updates / bug fixes released?
Bug fixes are released when bugs are found and fixed. As far as major updates, there haven't been any since this software is only a few months old. We are supposed to have a major release soon, but I'm not sure what will be involved. Upgrading is really easy, though, and doesn't really affect the hacks the way that upgrading a UBB did.

I did try sending these questions to sales@vbulletin.com on 2nd of August, but nobody bothered replying. I hope the after-sales support isn't as slack as the pre-sales support! :)

Right now this is a 2 man company. The software kind of took off and they are playing catch up with staffing. John, the head tech weenie, is currently out of pocket working on some upgrades for the next release so James is all by his lonesomes playing hell keeping up.

I hope this helps:)

[modelsys]

Thanks for your reply Martin.

>> Some people will have access to all forums, other
>> people may only have access to one or two forums.
>>Possible?
>
> Yes, but it's a little tricky right now. You have to set
> up usergroups and assign forums to each usergroup, then
> assign the members to the particular usergroup that you
> want them in. It's a sort of a mess right now, but John
> is supposed to be working on it.

So do you mean I've got to set up a usergroup for each forum I have (ie 5 forums = 5 usergroups), and then I assign members to different groups (ie one member can belong to more than one usergroup at a time)? Or do I set up usergroups with every possible combination of forums and then assign each member to just the usergroup that matches the forums they need access to? (Sorry for confusing things, but I don't think the demo version that I downloaded and installed has any of this in it).

>> How does vBulletin keep track of which messages are new?
>> Does it only flag new threads or also new messages
>> within old threads?
>
> I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. vB uses
> cookies and when you leave the board and come back, all
> topics, new or old with new replies, are flagged with a
> different colored icon from the ones that have no new
> messages in them.
> It does not, however, keep track of what you have and
> have not read already.

So does it keep track of the highest message number a person has read in each forum? And from that work out which are new messages?

> Right now this is a 2 man company.

Ah, that's ok then. I'm a shareware author so I know what it's like when you're a one (or two) man band.

One more little thing, when replying to a message, how are you supposed to quote bits from the message you're repying to? I noticed that your reply to my original message had bits quoted in italics. I didn't see any option to do this when I replied, so I had to manually copy and paste bits of your message when quoting above.