While I am running 4.2.1 how is VB keeping up with FB. My site has been around for 15 years and I am getting my ass kicked by FB, losing members to it. If VB doing anything to make some more features to keep up with FB or is as simple as folks have to like this format to keep membership?
How is VB keep up with FB?
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If you're losing members to Facebook, it's not because people think it has more features. You need to look at your content and what there is to keep members there, and keep an active community.
You're never going to prevent the loss of some people who will prefer to post photos of their dinner, however if your forum is in a particular subject area then you need to look at where on Facebook your members are going. Is there a Facebook group that is covering your niche and is attracting better content? What is there on your site that would keep members there? I can promise you that turning your forum into a Facebook clone wouldn't work't work at all. Content and Community are the key.
You can also enable the Facebook features on vBulletin which will provide a limited level of integration. You can then share your content on Facebook, as can your members. Get a Facebook page for your site with links back to the forum and push that.
Many forums remain hugely successful, and the future for successful forums does not lie in trying to turn forums into Facebook. That won't help your site, and it will kill other sites.MARK.B
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You're never going to beat Facebook by following Facebook. If a forum starts looking / acting like Facebook I'd stop going there. Facebook is for Facebook. Forums are forums. If I wanted my forum to act like Facebook I'd just use Facebook to begin with.
That said some features have found their way into the latest versions of VB like tagging users with the @ sign, I suspect small things like that will continue to get added to the software as time goes by.
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You can't download pics in a snap, not user friendly on Vb as it is on FB and doing so from your phone right to your time line, to your friends, can't do that from your phone to a thread with ease. No good chat or messenger feature here, another highly used feature of FB. My site has been around for 15 years this April and i have seen a slow drain of membership to FB just simply because it is a more user friendly set up, that is what I am told by my members that go to FB.Tim L
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Chatrooms have never been a function of Forums and never will be, that much I can say with some certainty.
Again as Joe states, if you want a chatroom then a forum isn't the best platform to do it.
That said both all three live branches (vB3, vB4 and vB5) have third party 'shoutbox' type add ons available. They won't replicate Facebook's functionality though, because, again, forums are simply not Facebook.
Picture uploading could do with some improvements but that's nothing to do with Facebook and if they do get improvements it'll not be an attempt to replicate Facebook.
Sorry that none of this is what you really want to hear, but forums imitating Facebook would just kill off forums for good.MARK.B
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The staff here may have to abide by company policy and "smile and be politely" when they explain why they aren't going to try to be the next Facebook, but I'm just a member and am not obliged by company policy to be a "customer rep with a positive attitude." If you want Facebook, go to Facebook. If you don't want Facebook and you want something more in-depth, you get a forum like vBulletin. If you want a better and easier way to keep track and find topics of interest, you get a forum like vBulletin. If you want to waste 5 seconds posting about what you had for breakfast, you go to Facebook.
Forums are not the Facebook social network platform. Forums have more depth to it than Facebook and will always be far superior in discussions than Facebook's wall posts and comment system. If people are too lazy to use a forum to communicate a full idea, then you should be looking into something like Dolphin, which was designed as a Facebook-like social platform.
I have been against forums moving towards a Facebook-like platform ever since people like your members, 1yesfan, kept suggesting unnecessary features because "Facebook does it, you should too." It is this very reason people like them piss me off so much. Any forum brand that decides to become another Facebook will lose their business and any interest/donations (if non-commercial) and their life as a forum will end right there. You don't fight Facebook, you become something they're not. They don't have the in-depth conversation feature that you see right here in this topic. They are mere simpletons who wouldn't be able to type this much in a single post and would rather spam you to death with 50 comments of 5 words maximum per comment. If I get banned from this forum for speaking up like this, so be it. But I want them to keep this post whether they like it or not, just to show why people need to stop asking for a forum to be "just like Facebook."👍 2Comment
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You're never going to beat Facebook by following Facebook. If a forum starts looking / acting like Facebook I'd stop going there. Facebook is for Facebook. Forums are forums. If I wanted my forum to act like Facebook I'd just use Facebook to begin with.
That said some features have found their way into the latest versions of VB like tagging users with the @ sign, I suspect small things like that will continue to get added to the software as time goes by.
Some small features can be incorporated without sacrifying identity and purpose of the forum. For example you can make latest activity tab or latest topic sidebar widget to load content without refresh.
or like in Memberlist there is no search function there. You can try to do like facebook. Searching people showing results at the same time.Comment
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btw beyond the shoutbox style chats, there actually is 2 different brands of "FB style" footer chats that integrate to vb...idk if vb is stable enough for them yet, but i can easily see it being a thing...yes i also agree vb5 can grow to be more the valued replacement than the other way around and they are at least giving themselves room to grow...nobody can say thats not true hahaComment
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You can't download pics in a snap, not user friendly on Vb as it is on FB and doing so from your phone right to your time line, to your friends, can't do that from your phone to a thread with ease. No good chat or messenger feature here, another highly used feature of FB. My site has been around for 15 years this April and i have seen a slow drain of membership to FB just simply because it is a more user friendly set up, that is what I am told by my members that go to FB.
Nothing about social media serves any of those purposes. Social media is a "look at me!" hit and run environment where everyone is talking or posting selfies and no one is listening.
So, for the record, are shoutboxes and chat rooms, which is why they should never be included in the core software. They kill forum discussion.
Social media serves its purpose but its purpose doesn't serve me. There are many people social media does not serve. The key is your target audience.
If you're targeting people who simply like to talk about anything for their attention span of ten seconds and then talk about something else that's a dying niche in forums.
The most successful forums are those that target a specific niche and a specific audience and provide something or some things that members cannot get elsewhere.
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