Forum Software Preference

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hiransom

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Jan 4, 2011
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1st time posting here - I think this is probably the best community to get opinions from on this issue.

For many years I've wanted to set up a forum to turn my newsletter audience into a community.

The 45k audience members are IT professionals from many fortune 500 companies and many .gov/.edu subs.

I have about 22,000 technical articles published over many years but never gave them the ability to share their expertise. Now, I want them to be able to do just that and open up the potential of this audience to contribute to the content value.

One team member wants to just open up the articles to comment threads like any other WP site but I want to let this niche group just run more on their own like any other forum.

I've been approached by some companies with fancy new community interfaces that just feel fancy like repackaged forums but I think people just want to share experience and solutions (at least that's all I care about).

I decided that we will go with a forum to start with. I have a few dedicated servers, one of which has cPanel with Softaculous, so it has these ready to install:

Advanced Electron Forum
phpBBphpBB
XMBXMB
MyBBMyBB
Phorum
PunBB
UseBB
FluxBB
bbPress
Vanilla Forums

If there is a compelling enough reason I can run one of these that may require WordPress.

In the back of my mind is all the social networking software that's also available but I think these people might want to just cut to the chase to share their knowledge and care less about anything that is overly "social" centric.
 


hiransom said:
Do you think IT pros would like a more no BS route like Vanilla?
Click to expand...

IT professionals are going to feel more comfortable on vBulletin, mainly because they have used it 100x before. They will know how to setup thread subscriptions, customize their profile, find whatever they want, and you shouldn't end up needing to offer much in the way of support.

The same people will look at phpBB and worry about the security of their information.

Vanilla... personally I'd say it's no BS route is appealing. Most IT guys wouldn't have heard of it, and aren't going to have preconceptions about security or anything like that. The community may appreciate the lack of post customization, since it tends to help stop noobs looking like noobs.

The choice is yours, the familiarity of vBulletin might be just what you need, to get the forum going strong from the beginning.
 
Funny thing is that you're right about vBulletin as that's what I'm most familiar with but I just looked at some evals of Vanilla and it has a lot of merit.

You helped me narrow the field. I'm not yet sure which to use yet but thanks for taking the time to help suggest.
 
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