What is Reddit's opinion of vBulletin?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Steam is using vBulletin, an off-the-shelf forum software (there's some small text at the bottom of the page that says so). Another popular one I see a lot is phpbb.

I think lots of us stop by those places at least occasionally. There's tons of great info on those sites, and some very smart people. The community here seems a bit more accessible and accepting though, so I really like it here best. But the issues you describe are really a result of the different website technologies.

Reddit was originally a link-sharing service but happens to have a good commenting system in place that we can use for discussion, so its become a lot more than its original design. I maintain that the search here is also absolutely terrible.

CPF is a traditional vBulletin forum. There are millions of them spread out all over the internet because its free software that anybody can use to open their own forum website. They're really fine for most forum-type activities but I've always hates its lack of threaded conversations. You really only get one main line of communication and if you don't keep up with things long discussion threads get very cumbersome.

I'm really not sure what BLF is built on (Drupal maybe?) but its another traditional linear forum. Some of us older guys who've been hanging out on Internet forums since nntp was still a popular way to communicate are just used to them, I guess.

As /u/satoru1111 has said, that archive is handled by the forum software used by Ubisoft, which ironically is also vBulletin (only without the branding). If Ubisoft were to remove their forums, that archive wouldn't exist either.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/archive/ is a thing, except that apparently some stuff is horribly broken that it gives a database error sometimes. If you aren't lucky to get it live, you can search on Google with the term "site:forums.steampowered.com/forums/archive" and you'll get a hit. Open the cached version and you'll see it has the same layout.

Also, a small note, the term "archive" here isn't really what you think it is. For vBulletin it's mostly used to be friendly for search engines (https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/vboptions_group_archive) and not really for manual browsing or archival purposes.

Depends on what you want from a site.

It seems you want a wiki? You also want to be able to have discussions. So something like a Vbulletin site might fit the bill. Vbulletin as a few options. You can buy a VB license and then sign up on a webhosting site like GoDaddy and set up your own forum.

Or Vbulletin has a cloud option where they run the site for you. You don't have to buy or maintain a site or do backups. But the cheapest plan is about $180 a year. https://www.vbulletin.com/en/vbcloud-features/

You can add a wiki via https://www.vaultwiki.org/

Unfortunately it is alive and being actively developed ... at at least $250 a go.

It reminds me of those sprawling corporate monsters like SAP and Oracle which would probably survive nuclear war ...

You wouldn't want to create a forum from scratch, there are many popular options such as:

1. http://www.phpbb.com/ (free)
2. https://www.vbulletin.com/ (cost money)

I haven't worked with forums in a few years, so maybe other people know better alternatives.

Regardless, you would want to "skin" or "theme" these forums, so they look customized. You can probably hire a freelancer to do this for a few $100.

Then it is just a matter of buying a domain and web hosting (could probably get this for around ~$50 a year, I use http://www.namecheap.com)

vBulletin (They call it "Article Tags")

phpBB - Interesting, cant find tagging for phpBB, even as MOD.

IP.Board (Blog post about them adding support for tagging)

This thread has some answers. I have no idea how accurate they are though: https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum/general/chit-chat/4376685-gdpr-and-vbulletin

Relevant:

> Threads and posts wouldn't be considered "personal data" under this regulation unless they specifically contained publicly accessible personal identifying information. Real Name, Physical Address, Telephone Number(s), E-mail address(es), IP Addresses, Credit Card or Banking Information, etc.

How'd you get on with the other topics you started? - was it solved and did this link help?

That too. Just look at this though :

https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/stylemanager_edit_templates

The second screenshot is where it gets hairy. I'm sure it makes sense after you use it for a period of time but I rather not.

I haven't fooled with many forums so I can't offer any advice on which to use.

Some vBulletin customers (from there website https://www.vbulletin.com/):

• Houston Texans
• Flyertalk
• Bodybuilding.com
• Pearl Jam
• Fitday
• Zynga
• EA
• Sony Pictures
• Steam
• NASA
• Denver Broncos

On the Steam note - does this affect local machines for Steam customers (like myself)?

I've never configured one before, but in a quick google search, found this page on vBulletin that looks like you set user groups permissions, and from the permissions shown, looks like you can set one group to only reply to their own, and another groups to reply to anything...

Oh and this on creating new user groups to put those settings on.

I imagine free ones like PhpBB probably has similar settings.

Yes daddy.

Pretty sure this is what chemforum uses for their forums. $14.99/month for a decent website setup. Could easily aggregate reviews this way.

The big thing we could have on chemforum is P2P vendor support. Chemforum is pretty strict about this. If you have a way to make this a selling point for your forum you could attract a ton of attention.

If you're planning on adding forums and groups so you can expand to other games, rather than start from scratch, I'd suggest something like https://www.vbulletin.com/ it has a pretty robust back end and is really customizable. It can be modded to work with a lot of different front end packages and has the ability to have a custom app for your site.

So it's not as easy as putting .htaccess in /root/?

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I don't know anything about db or vbforums so excuse my ignorance, but looking at some threads about this on their forums turn up a few methods to fix this.

What are you programming in? PHP?

http://php.net/manual/en/book.bbcode.php

You using vBulletin?

https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/misc.php?do=bbcode https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php/199304-How-To-Make-a-YouTube-BB-Code

Varnish isn't a plugin obviously - you can set up a varnish installation, and the vbulletin plugin is supposed to assist with cache hits/misses.

https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/entry.php/2452-Boosting-vBulletin-performance-via-caching-Apache-Varnish-versus-Litespeed-Cache

most forums are run off the same script and might already have an app for the script. Example: VBulletin is one of the most popular forum scripts and they have an app - https://www.vbulletin.com/ - PHPBB is another popular forum script and they most likely have an android app as well.