We want to add a forum to our website. Does anybody have any recommendations? Does discountASP include any forum software in its component kits? Thanks Mitch
I run a forum using SMF from http://www.simplemachines.org. I recently upgraded from PHPBB, which I though was bug ridden and terrible to use.
It hurts to see PHP forums suggested here. (Where are my brothers in arms?) Over the past few years I've run two forum packages with hundreds of users. The easiest to setup and connect to ACCESS or SQL Server is Snitz: http://forum.snitz.com/ I had no problem customizing the look and function, all of the headers and footers are easy to modify. The best for User management and spam protection has been Web Wiz Forums: http://www.webwizguide.info/bbs/default.asp ...And foronly $95 these forums seem like a great deal: http://www.dotnetbb.com/
Ya I agree with you. As soon as I see an asp.net forum that's better than the php ones, I'll be sure to recommend it.
SMF is easily the best of the free forums. But if you don't mind parting with some $$, I would recommend vBulletin. If you expect your forum to grow to a considerable size (or even just a few hundred users), you will appreciate vBulletin's user handling and moderation options more than those of SMF, which is a bit bare-bones as far as admin options are concerned. Hence the name, I suppose. SMF would be a good starting point though, especially for a new forum that might take some time to grow. Note that SMF and vBulletin are both php/MySQL based. The .net forum choices out there are rather unimpressive compared to their php/MySQL counterparts.
Howdy Guys, new to this forum, long-time member of DicountASP. I wanted to thank you guys for turning me onto Snitz Forums, easy to set up, except the email part. What did you guys enter for the email configuration settings to get it to work? Thanks alot for any help you can provide. - Harrison
So what did you have to do to get the email working? I also am looking at Snits and also another package called SkyPortal. Does anyone have any experience with the SkyPortal ASP package? Thanks, Neuro
No experience with skyportal. There are many many PHP+mySQL offerings though, and they definitely beat this forum software.
Any new recommendations? I see this board in now on dotnetBB (which has been bought out). What else is now recommended for Forum Software? Anything new in the last year? Thanks for the help!
This forum has always been dotNetBB. Though development seems to have stopped on dotNetBB some years ago, and it doesn't provide much of the functionality that we are finding we need as the community grows. Oddly enough, dotNetBB placed second in the "best forum" category of asp.netPro Magazine Reader's Choice this year! Abandonware being the second best option gives you some idea of the state of .NET forum development in general. We are investigating alternatives, and may make a change next year. Switching forum software is likely to be more than a little painful, but the long-run benefits should be worth it.
PHP vs. DotNet I know that the last post was about 1.5 years ago but I see something disturbing, a staff member recommending PHP software i.e. vBulletin. MJP, stated, "This forum has always been dotNetBB," but I can't help but notice it says "vBulletin" at the bottom of the forum page. Maybe you switched in the last year and 1/2. The conflict is that my other web development cronies are telling me to go PHP and I keep telling them, "No, I am too steeped in .NET, I have been using it since beta, and it is more powerful then PHP." After failed attempts to install 5 different CMS apps on discountAsp.net and the DotNetNuke site going down recently, I am starting to wonder. Now, after searching the Forums for the best Forum s/w the staff recommends PHP. Maybe I should reconsider.
Whether .net is more powerful than php is not the point. The question was, "what is the best forum software," and the best forum software is all written in php. That's not because php is better, it's because people using php had several years head start with forum development, so by the time the first .net forum sprung up, the php forums were already on their second and third mature versions. As for "portals," I think they are all bloated headaches - both .net and php flavors. We have a lot of issues with DNN here, and when I worked at unix hosts we had a lot of issues with PHP-Nuke and every other all-in-one package. They are not designed to perform well on a shared hosting platform. But as for this forum, trust me, we looked for a suitable .net forum to replace the old dotNetBB for a long time and they all fall short of what we're using now. Very, very short. Limiting yourself to a .net product when it is not the best in class (as in forums) is counterproductive. We are .net zealots and advocates, yes, but we are also realists.
...This is true and to the point. A few of the Community guys are working on this right now, Dave Burke and Joe Stagner both have .NET projects on-going to tackle this problem. While I'm at heart a Microsoft Fan boy I do admit none of the Microsoft forums run as well for world communities like the Steam forums at Valve, which are the same vBulletin package used here now. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/ Posts: 2,773,027, Members: 166,181
Big Help! MJP, you have been a big help!!!! I wish I had read something like this earlier before I wasted all my time trying out one CMS package after another. So, I guess I can conclude that I can upload vBulletin to my DiscountASP.net accounts and it will work. On another note, but still PHP related, I see a lot of powerful development being done using Joomla by people that are not long time developers. I am also a .net disciple having a strugle with realism. I am strongly considering making a switch to Joomla but I have strong doubts about it running on DiscountASP.NET.
If you know Joomla, you will likely already know that it is natively a PHP/MySQL driven application and although PHP5 is installed on the DASP servers, I don't think that MySQL is really supported around here anymore. This kb article seems to confirm that: https://support.discountasp.net/KB/...-mysql-to-an-sql-server.aspx?KBSearchID=45779 I know that I don't have the ability to get a MySQL database on my DASP account because the database management control panel tells me "MySQL is currently unavailable at your location"..not that I'm really bothered about that ;-) Someone did actually start up a Joomla / SQL Server migration project. It's discussed here http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=142051 but I really don't know where it's up to / if it got RTM because the thread seems to have dried up over there. Personally I think you're right to have doubts about being able to run Joomla on the DASP servers at present and it seems like the DASP guys agree because this topic has already been discussed here.
Joe/CrystalCMS is right, we don't offer MySQL anymore, so I'm afraid that vBulletin and Joomla are not options here. We set up a FreeBSD server to run this forum - don't tell Microsoft! - and we may also migrate our blog from Windows Live to this server at some point, so we have more control over it. If we could run it on a Windows box, we certainly would. For now you'll just have to hold your nose while you're here.
For a CMS, I can't really say. I don't personally have any experience with them on either platform. It seems less complicated to put together what you need using just the components you'll use (rather than a lot of default CMS stuff that will probably be unused). I know plenty of our users are running .net CMS' without any trouble. You'll just have to poke around to see what is preferred. But if you're intent on vBulletin or Joomla, yeah, you would have to run those elsewhere.
