question about vbulletin

[mattaxelrod]

Hi,

I've noticed that this forum, AOPA's, and many others are powered by vBulletin. I belong to a professional organization that utilizes a listserv for email, and I would like to bring them to the 21st century and utilize a forum such as we have here (with topics germaine to that profession obviously). I've gone on the vBulletin website and see that it seems to cost $160 to purchase the software, which is very cheap.

My organization does maintain its own website. What sort of things are involved in purchasing vBulletin and then setting it up? How difficult to maintain? I would imagine that if I pursued this, the job of forum administrator would probably fall to me.

Any info would be appreciated--seems silly to reinvent the wheel when you guys all do it so well.

Matt

 

[Greebo]

vBulletin is fairly easy to set up and maintain if you are comfortable with web technology. Basically what you need is a web server running php and a mysql database. Personally I prefer to run vBulletin on linux vs. windows based platforms, but that is personal preference.

The vBulletin support community is excellent - and a lot of your "pre-sales" questions can be answered by registering on the vBulletin.com forums and asking there. There are also a number of add-ons and hacks available for vBulletin at places like vBulletin.org, vBAdvanced.com, and so on.

You're looking at $160 for the vBulletin licence + $30/year for ongoing technical support. If you make no modifications to the software (no hacks) upgrades are extremely easy - download, unzip, upload, and run the updater program. Even with hacks, you generally just have to do the same, and then reapply the hacks.

I've used a lot of forum software in the last 25 years or so - vBulletin to date is my preferred both as a user and as an administrator.