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Hello there Mr. Scream,

I am a bulletin board newbie and I have been searching for a suitable discussion server package for a looooonnnnggg time.

I was so glad to finally find you after your product was mentioned in a 3 year old product review on a rather obscure website.

I am frankly amazed that you have such a nice product from what I can tell so far and yet it doesn't appear anywhere in the reviews of such software by people like PC Magazine etc. in my opinion all of the other ones like the product from oreilly etc are overpriced and inferior products. I would have likely been using a package like yours long ago if I had known you exist.

I have downloaded the test site you have but I have had a few problems getting it up and running.

It wasn't terribly easy to install all of the bits and pieces necessary to make it work but I will do my best to muddle through it.

unlike your other customers I am not a web programmer although we do have one on staff but he's quite busy on customer projects right now. so I'm spearheading this project to acquire a topflight discussion server package that we can easily integrate within our website environment.

I have narrowed down my review to just 2 products, vBulletin and WWWThreads.

I am at the point of wanting to make a purchasing decision right away since we are planning to launch a board that we expect will become quite popular in our industry.

at this point I have 3 main questions:

1. I would like to know in your opinion the main advantages of your product over vBulletin.

in my limited view it seems your products are almost identical except that you offer a threaded mode and they only offer a linear, or flat, message view.

at this point I am leaning more towards W3T but vBulletin does have a nice look and feel, especially their sister site which is running vBulletin, VB Q & A forum.

2. I would like to know how easy it is for us to obtain the add-on's, enhancements, or "hacks" as I think you call them that provide the advanced functionality of your VB Q & A forum site. I want to know if this is something that is easy for me to do as a business type or whether it will require our web developer to do it.

3. your site seems to be running very slowly whereas vBulletin's snaps back instantly. is this a limitation of your code or is it just your server which responds more slowly?

thank you for your help and keep up the good work.

Kurt
_______________
Kurt Carter
Florist Systems Corporation
"The Business and Technology Partner of the Local Florist"
tel: 613-741-4133 x203
fax: 613-741-2611
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web: www.floristsystems.com



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Thanks for the feedback Kurt. I wish I could get some of the big name places to review this, but I'm just a little too small I think[]/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/].

As for your questions. To be honest I don't know an awful lot of vbulletin. It seems those that use their product are very happy with it and from what I have heard it is a good forum product. But I don't really know what they have in the way of features, so I can't really compare the 2. I can say that WWWThreads has been in development for about 4 years now, 2 of those years in flat file development and 2 with a database backend. The program itself is constantly evolving as you can see in the CHANGELOG. Hmm, not too sure what else to say on this one[]/w3timages/icons/crazy.gif[/].

Secondly, what you see on this forum is what you will get upon setup of the full version. All features you see here are part of the full release. Coloring/fonts, etc are handled by the stylesheet or skin and there are a few distributed with the program. As for adding in hacks that other users have created you would need to know a bit of programming perhaps, but many have pretty clear instructions on how to put them in place.

The last question on speed. If you have been visiting over the past day we have been having some router issues at our host so things have been fairly slow as of late. Normally, things should be pretty quick. You can also try visiting both versions, the PHP or the PERL version to see if you notice any speed difference there.


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From the vBulletin web site:

"Leased License - $85

A leased license grants you the right to run vBulletin on one web server and one web site for each license purchased for 1 year from date of order. Each license may power one instance of vBulletin on one domain. During the year, you will have unlimited access to the member area, where you can download updated versions of the software. At the end of the year, you must purchase another license in order to continue to run vBulletin."

Would you REALLY be interested in buying a piece of software that you had to pay for each and every year???

This is RENTware.....in the extreme!

No thanks......

Brew
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Actually you can customize W3T to look very much like vBulletin, the color can be changed by editing the configuration file.

Maybe screem can consider to put some more good looking icons on the interface just like vBulletin... it does look quite nice []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]


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thank you, Kli.

for me the colour scheme is not a very big deal since I like W3T's look already.

I had a feeling it was a simple matter as you describe.

however, the more advanced buttons like reply with quote such as vBulletin has would be nice.

thanks,

KCI


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thanks,

good point but not a big deal for me since I would go with their purchase option of $160.

cheers,

KC


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OOOPS

My bad.

I didn't read afr enough down!!!

I got to that one line and said ppff "no thanks"....LOL...sorry

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thanks for responding, Scream,

the review I read on the pcmagazine site of about 2 years ago mentioned some real fly by night companies, most of whose links were no longer valid so I can't believe that you are too small.

I would definitely pursue them because you have a nice product.

It would really help me if somebody did a feature comparison of the two products since my brief 20 hours or so of research indicate that you're the only 2 serious ones out there. I have spent a lot of time researching the market to get to this point and now I can see that it will take me yet more time before I can settle on the product I want to purchase.

I would really just like to buy it today but I feel there is still so much I don't know about both products and I don't want to get into an implementation and then be disappointed.

I had some difficulty setting yours up whereas vBulletin was quite straightforward. I will spend more time at yours and let you know.

my head is telling me that your product is more powerful but potentially more difficult to use. vBulletin seems slightly snazzier (but not by much) and easy to use with their template-based approach (still haven't been able to get yours up and working yet).

but I feel VERY confined by their non-threaded, flat message-only format. I've been using the W3T's threaded mode quite a bit as I find it easier to follow a conversation thread like this and I then switch back to flat mode since this is easier for reading. I can't believe this isn't a standard feature of vBulletin

just wish I knew what the other "gotcha's" were with both products.

had a feeling the speed thing was something else.

thanks,

KC


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What version are you setting up, the PHP or the PERL version? The PHP is probably the easiest of the 2 to setup, but whichever one you are working on I would appreciate any feedback you can give on trouble spots on the install or what you think would make it easier.


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I can appreciate your concerns. However, life is not always black and white...sometimes you have to take a chance. Your first instinct is usually the right one.

You won't be sorry with W3T!


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there is a chance that i might be the only one who owned vb and wwwthreads. basically it comes down to support. if there is ever a bug in w3t (wwwthreads) scream will most likely get on it and either a tell you how to fix it, or b fix it himself and release another update. vb has only come out with 3 releases and they are very very basic bug fixes. scream almost comes to the forums everyday and interacts with us.

feature wise vb and w3t are pretty much the same. vb doesn't have as many features built in as w3t has. but vb has more features as style goes, you can customize the header for each board and stuff like that. add smileys from the admin section, add markup in the admin.

performance wise i know the w3t loads alot faster. i was running vb on a shared server and the admins told me that my vb was taking up all the server resources, so i had to find another board and thats how i found w3t.

and if you ever get into hacking the board scream comments the code so well that you know exaclty whats going on.



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hey I appreciate the response.

yes I think I know that W3T is more powerful. its just that vB seems to have a few more style features and may be easier to administer than W3T. however, I believe that scream is very committed to moving the product forward from the comments he's made on the board.

when it comes right down to it, I just can't get around the fact that I feel the threading feature of W3T is a must have feature.
have you found that to be an important feature for your users?

could it be that I'm making that first step? oh there goes the big toe.

hey, the water's not cold at all after all! :)

Kurt Carter
Florist Systems
"The Business and Technology Partner of the Local Florist"

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wow now I'm majorly impressed! what a great find you are!

nothing speaks more loudly than a converted customer.

while I appreciate all of the other comments made on this thread, this is the most tangible one for me.

scream if you're listening, I think you need to promote poil to official W3T Evangelist for the uninitiated and the unconverted, those still halting between W3T and "the other product."

poil, I wonder if you could do something for me?

could you tell me a little more about your experience with vB and W3T as far as how long you've used each one and what the key feature differences have been for you switching from vB to W3T?

although you had sort of a forced choice I am curious to know what features are most important to you on a daily basis that are either supplied by W3T or which you are having to do without.

as a novice to both products it seems they're very similar. for me that main difference that would sell me on W3T is that it offers the choice of threaded and flat mode. I just don't think I could live without it. however I much prefer vB's profile area. its laid out more intuitively than W3T's. it also seems some of their users have integrated chat quite nicely but perhaps that's a common element of both products. these are the only major things I've noticed.

I'm not trying to split hairs but if I make a decision on W3T I don't want to regret it in a few months. I can already see that I will be slightly restricted in some areas like style etc but perhaps these haven't proved to be real show stoppers for folks like you who are running real boards.

Kurt Carter
Florist Systems
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the PHP.

I seem to get stuck at the configuration of main.inc.php with regard to the path etc.

I'm just working through it again right now.

what would make it easier?

that's easy. an installshield type installation that would set it all up automatically.

have all of the configuration options within your script files appear as questions to be answered in the automated setup and then, voila, it would do all the work for us. that should include in my opinion the installation of php and mysql.

is there any reason none of you folks that create discussion server software do it this way?

it just seems so obvious that this is the way to do it.

you would likely garner a lot more non-techie, business type customers like me who have a great need for software like this but don't have the technical expertise or time to fiddle that your typical W3T board members do.

Kurt Carter
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the configuration files are scary compared to vBulletin.

I'm not a programmer and I don't intend to become one. they have a nice template approach which I used to get up and running in a jiffy. with yours I have to scour through a very hard to read series of text files and I'm never sure if I'm filling in the right spots. I usually give up halfway through the really long one, config.php I believe, because its just too overwhelming.

what happens then when I try to bring up one of the pages like createtable.php or any other one is that I get a browser full of text information that I can't do anything with.

is there not a step by step intallation guide that could help me? its just WAY too complicated to get started with this product. hopefully I can get over this hurdle because I see great potential in it for our organization. we just can't afford to jump into a product that is going to be so support-intensive.

iI lways thought that the purpose of software was to make our lives easier.

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i kind of went randomly into vbulletin, just choosing it for the php factor. at that moment in time there was no w3t for php. so i went with vbulletin. vbulletin was quit nice because they had templates, but the templates were built into mysql. at the time vb didn't have private messaging, or any other user customizable features that w3t has had for a very long time. as a user i like w3t more, it has many more options for the user to decide what looks best as a board. example, if the fonts are too small, just go into your preferences and choose a style sheet with larger fonts. w3t gives more options as to threaded/flat modes or expanded/collapsed threads. giving the users features to look at the board as they please.

if you like the looks of vb, with some work you can get w3t to look just like it.

if you are going to have an article based site, you could almost use w3t as the framework for it. w3t is just a message board, but with a little work it can be so much more. mainly i would choose w3t over vb cause vb doesn't have scream.

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No sweat, according to the changelog:

In reply to:

December 29, 2000
- Finished with the front end editor of the w3ttheme.pm file.
- Finished with the scripts for updating the w3ttheme.pm file from
the online editor.
- Finished with the online stylesheet editor. This grabs any .css files
in your stylesheets directory and makes them available for editing
in an online form box.
- Added a new admin script for creating new stylesheets. Uses a file
called template.css for the new stylesheets base. Also allows the
admin to test the stylesheet when creating it.
- Added the option to immediately test a stylesheet when an edited
version is submitted.


So the online editing function would hopefully come with the next version []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/] you just have wait to for a little bit longer....

About the installation, I agree it is a painful process, however doing it manually I think would allow more compatability across various platform... anyway it's not too difficult if you follow the installation instructions, it's just a boring task.




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In reply to:

should include in my opinion the installation of php and mysql



You have to be careful about the MySQL licensing here. MySQL is free under most circumstances, but if you start bundling it with your product you have to pay for it (at least that's how it used to be--I haven't checked lately).

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In reply to:

but I feel VERY confined by their non-threaded, flat message-only format. I've been using the W3T's threaded mode quite a bit as I find it easier to follow a conversation thread like this and I then switch back to flat mode since this is easier for reading. I can't believe this isn't a standard feature of vBulletin


I agree! If W3T ever dumped this feature, I don't know what I'd do. []/w3timages/icons/crazy.gif[/] It was, and still is one of the most attractive features (to me anyway) regarding this product. I often get a head-ache when wading through other forum systems' flat-only views.

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