Someone should be fired over the 'NEW' SOE forums

[Laodaron]

Makes sense that SoE wanted to money grub those dimes and so in the process we get left with garbage? GREAT CS!

[Bruised]

Originally Posted by Laodaron

Makes sense that SoE wanted to money grub those dimes and so in the process we get left with garbage? GREAT CS!

There's nothing terribly wrong with the new boards. My main issue was some forums not being imported to the new software.

Better to have a free steaming pile than a pay steaming pile.

[Laodaron]

Its better on the profit side to have a free steaming pile, not the customer side...and I don't think that they TOTALLY suck either, but what we had owed hard against these ones.

[Evalin]

What makes you think they went with a free/open source solution. Can you trace it back to an open source project? I'm guessing most people can't. I suspect that the new forums where developed in house. They are using the same technologies on the forums as they are on eq2players. They have the resources to build their own forums and it may in fact be cheaper to hire a few more staff to work on their own forums full time versus paying a third party.

BTW here is what Lithium has to say about their pricing model
http://www.lithium.com/company/pricingmodel.html

[LFG]

I hate to say this and don't mean to criticize the official forums while they are being blasted by so many others, but I honestly feel like they could have done better just by doing what I did.

And that's spending $120 for a vBulletin license, and then maybe putting an html front end on that with some flash (ok, I didn't do that second part, because I can't find anyone who has skills and will work for beer).

vBulletin scales nicely to and works well in high traffic applications. Several large boards are using this. It isn't complicated, as you can probably tell from the fact that I admin this site. And it seems to make people happy, and is familiar and easy to use.

[Ariven]

Originally Posted by LFG

I hate to say this and don't mean to criticize the official forums while they are being blasted by so many others, but I honestly feel like they could have done better just by doing what I did.

And that's spending $120 for a vBulletin license, and then maybe putting an html front end on that with some flash (ok, I didn't do that second part, because I can't find anyone who has skills and will work for beer).

vBulletin scales nicely to and works well in high traffic applications. Several large boards are using this. It isn't complicated, as you can probably tell from the fact that I admin this site. And it seems to make people happy, and is familiar and easy to use.

Yeah I agree there.. of all the forum software I have participated on, I like the feature set of vBulletin the best..

[Ladred]

Not to mention that with vB 3.0 (i believe thats when they started) they implemented a complete plugin/injection system so that you could make huge customizations to your board without having to do any editing of the code.

yes, I'm a huge vB fanboi. from what i've read about jforums is that its a basic implementation of phpbb in java, and that its only a foundation. relying soley on the implementor to build on top of the basic foundation that is provided.

the reason for switching off of lithium were not completely costs. it had some to do with the fact that they couldn't do their own customizations, which made the guild forums thing difficult to implement. i really just wish they would have taken vB for a spin before going with jforums. maybe they did, but i'd like to see some reasoning behind one over the other.

[Pylon]

I like phpBB, because its all I know. =(

[LFG]

Originally Posted by Pylon

I like phpBB, because its all I know. =(

All I know is vB > phpBB.

[Niber]

phpBB is awesome (for what it is). I tried out phpBB3 yesterday and it's impressive considering they only have 7 part time developers, all of which donate their time for free.

But it's hard to compare it to any commercial product like Ipb or vB. You get what you pay for.