Why vbulletin over UBB

[yvrguy]

I am looking at setting up a large scale forums community and was wondering why it would be considered better vto us vBulletin versus UBB.

I was looking at their new Open Topic hosted forum option. It looks very feature rich (but expensive)

I am not a webmaster, but will need to evaluate my webmasters decision

Any feedback would be helpful.

Cheers...CB

[WizyWyg]

1. ub uses flat file system
2. vb uses a mysql database

plain and simple, vb is faster because of a database

[tubedogg]

UBB is not intended for large communities. By their own standard they recommend having less than 20,000 users. You also will find problems searching with a large amount of posts.
In comparison vBulletin has been tested with up to 50,000 users and two million posts. Assuming your server(s) has/have been optimized there is no reason search should have the impact on your server that UBB's does.
OpenTopic is an interesting idea but you do not have anything approaching full control over it and you are at the mercy of their servers/uptime.
You might want to take a look at our Admin Control Panel demo for an idea of how extensive vBulletin's system is --> http://www.vbulletin.com/admindemo/

[yvrguy]

Thanks very much for your very prompt reply!!

I have another question on the structure

Not being a webmaster, I find it a bit hard to explain... Here goes..

How many layers can you have till a user get to the posts...

let's say you have your board broken down in....

User type/continent/country/state/city

Is this possible... and if so, is reasonable.

Do you have any sample sites that might have this structure that I might be able to view?

Cheers, Colin.

[tubedogg]

You can have as many levels deep as you wish (which I might add is not possible with UBB ;) and maybe not OpenTopic, I'm not sure on that one). Check out the admindemo (http://www.vbulletin.com/admindemo/) - I will setup a structure like you suggest.

[yvrguy]

Thanks again for your response. I did take you up on the admin demo. I liked what I experienced. I was able to set up the structure as to how I envisioned. I also browsed around other features... :p

A few more questions (I hope you don't mind...)

1) I want my site to be able to work kind of like a personals ads site.. where people can post a photo of themselves and details. This post would be the start of a new thread. And then other users could post comments about them.

- Can we set up forms when starting a new topic to ask questions & pulldowns in order to get info we need? This form would be the beginning of a new thread.

- Can we also allow that poster to attach a photo that would display as a thumbnail when people were viewing post?

- With getting people to add these photos and them being displayed as thumbnails... will this cause too many problems when the board gets quite sizeable in concurrent users and data?

- I am assuming that a webprogramer will be able to decide what areas and fetaures of the board could be "pay members only"??

Again, thanks for your help on this. Cheers CB