Posted: 11/09/2002 4:00:00 PM
Our site revolves around our forums for which we currently use vBulletin. We don't use most of the bells-and-whistles (rating, message icons, calendar, avatars, etc.), which leads some other vBulletin users to question why we use it, but it has some important, if more basic, features, to wit:
The ability to easily create levels of categories and subcategories, as well as forums and subforums.
Very configurable, extensive per forum and per user group permissions.
Less than ideal, but still useful unread-message tracking, as well as a very useful indicator of threads to which you posted.
Ability to obtain email notification for threads that you didn't start or post to and email notification of only the first post since last visit. (vBulletin 3 will add the ability of users to select email notification of new posts to a forum, a much requested feature.)
Easy to use tools for moderators to move, copy, close, edit, delete, split, and merge threads. These are accessible right from the forums pages and do not require accessing the moderators control panel, which is separate from the admin control panel.
Move with redirect, which leaves a redirect link when a thread is moved, one of vBulletin's biggest time savers.
Posts in a thread are contained in separate tables, which allows posts with code to go wide without making the entire thread go wide. Very important to us, as we post a lot of code.
Relatively easy to use templating system. While not especially easy to use, vBulletin's templating system is far better than any other bulletin board at which I've looked. One very nice little hook is a feature that lets you display the names of the templates used in the HTML output, which makes it much easier to figure out which templates do what and which you need to modify to customize the pages.
These are some of things I'd be looking for in Inportal's forums.
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samantha~
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: samtha25 on 2002-11-23 16:10 ]</font>
