Thinking about vBulletin

[OlympusXP]

Hi,

I work for www.actiontrip.com which is a gaming site and we're looking into putting forums on the website for our users. We already have a PHP-based system of comments for articles and news, but this is a simple system where you can only reply to the articles or news.

We would like fully functional forums on our website, and I have told my superiors that vBB would be the best choice for us. Because of our hit volume and the prospective amount of users that might use the forum we need something that is fast and reliable. PHP with a MySQL backend seems the right choice.

There are a few questions, however. How much extra bandwidth will the forum use? Is there a way we could at least estimate this to a rough figure. It is not an issue, we just need to know for future growth purposes.

Also, there are a few automated things we will need.
Using the forum for articles (reviews, previews, etc.) is easy. We can just create the topic of the article in the forum and link back to the thread via the article on the website itself.

We do however, need the news comments to be somehow automated. In other words, when we post news on the frontpage, a topic needs to be automatically created in the forums. The news topics will obviously be in a special section dedicated to news, and where users only have access to reply to the threads.

This could also go both ways. The ideal way would be to have the section in the forums, and post news through the forums, and have the forum thread be included on the front page.

In other words, our news posting system IS vBB.

Can someone please comment on this and tell me how everything would work and how easy this will be to integrate. Also, will it be fairly easy to create a vBB theme that matches our site's design?

[Andy Z]

1. There are hacks at vbulletin.org that may do what you want. I'm not quite sure, as I haven't been keeping up. If their isn't you could ask ( or pay) for someone to create one specifically for your site.

2. Making vB match your site is VERY easy, simply edit the templates online thorugh teh Admin CP. (see demo: http://vbulletin.com/admindemo/).

3. Bandwidth: Really depends on how many graphics on a page, and how many users visit., etc.
Someone else may be able to come along and better answer this.

HTH, ;)

[OlympusXP]

Ahh I see. You're right, that is very easy to change the colors and styles for the forums.

If my understanding is correct, all we need to do is edit the systle sheet with the colors and text and everything else and that will change all of the tables, etc. automatically?

[Andy Z]

Yes, that is correct. Try it out at the admindemo (http://vbulletin.com/admindemo/admin/ User: admin Pass: admin).

[iFly]

ah, you will only get people telling good about vBulletin in their own forums :p.

I would suggest checking 3rd party websites like http://www.chooseyourforum.com/comparisons/ to decide which forum is best for your website :).

[filburt1]

vBulletin already ties with the top rating, too ;)

[TheEDIGuy]

Olympus, as a VERY rough figure, my site averages 40 concurrent visitors, has about 1200 posts per day and 35,000 page views, and hits about 1/2 gig of bandwidth per day. But that number would fluctuate wildly depending on graphics, etc.

And we use vBportal for our front page (www.phpportals.com, I think) to do kind of what you plan to do. It's free, and works pretty well.

Feel free to check out the site, and if you have any questions about specifics, let me know and I'll try to help.

[OlympusXP]

Thanks for all the replies and for helping out. We don't need something as extensive as VbPortal, all we need is something that will pull news from a specific forum and put the subject in a headline table on the front page and of course put the body contents into tables on the front page also. I found some pretty interesting scripts for this over at vbulletin.org, one being Pluhnews.

Everyone from my site got together today and we talked about the forums, and it seems like everything is a go ahead. We've chosen vBulletin and now we're just waiting to do some other things with the site before we install the forums.

We're going to be switching to some new servers on a new network pretty soon, probably in about one month, and we're hoping that vBulletin 3 might be out by then.

If it is not, is it possible we could use a near-final beta of vBulletin 3 on our site? If so, we'll need to talk more.

[filburt1]

Re: vB3, sometime (the biggest mystery) licensed users will be able to choose between vB3 beta or vB2.2.x. So if you buy now or later, you'll still have access to vB3 (eventually).