Happy with SMF forum or want to go back to Vbulletin or phpBB?

[cichlidfish]

I'm contemplating whether to stick with SMF or switch to something else....so smf, love it or hate it or could care less?

[stilllearnin]

my preferance in order and why


SMF - uses a lot less resources (diskspace and bandwidth)
it seems more user cutomizable.

Vbulletin - doesn't offer a whole lot more then smf but it's not a terriable system either, personally I couldn't make it run as fast on my host as I can smf

phpBB - I'd want if all other  forum systems fall off the face of the earth, just ran a small test forum and it used a [b]lot[/b] of resources and emails were extracted fast by spam bots.

[Mark Stone]

Maybe it's the way I organize thoughts, but it seemed to me that VB was easier to manage from an administrator viewpoint - I still haven't figured out how to post announcements here at SMF

Also, Worldcichlids uses smf, as does Ultimate (Tony's new project) and the look and feel is identical (Tony's got a different skin -), I think it would be nice to be different. My vote if I had the choice would be to go back to vb, but I don't dislike smf at all-

[cichlidfish]

Ah, no easy choice as usual
Well, I guess SMF 2.0 is around the corner with some new features, we'll see...one thing I always hated about Vbulletin is that good THEMES were always hard to come by, all the decent ones you had to buy, none free in contrast with phpBB and SMF which have tons of decent looking themes/styles. But if you remember I had quite a few "HACKS" on the old Vbulletin, some of them like the bookmarks etc...it was always easier to to find and add cool hacks on Vbulletin and it always had the most features out of the box also, including a pretty nice intuitive admin interface. The main thing I like about phpBB versus SMF is that SMF in my opinion is likely to go 'paid subcription' or something in the way of Invision Board/IPB ...they let you use it for free but its not open source GPL so if they start 'charging' no one can pick up the LAST FREE VERSION and start another 'free branch' of it. Not that there's anything wrong about charging, but you should do it from the start like Vbulletin, not pretend you're free and ride the open source GPL momentum to your advantage and then stop abruptly.

[stilllearnin]

[quote] I still haven't figured out how to post announcements here at SMF

[/quote]

How to you mean?
Like change or add to the news box?
or mailing people through the forum?


[quote]Also, Worldcichlids uses smf, as does Ultimate (Tony's new project) and the look and feel is identical (Tony's got a different skin -), I think it would be nice to be different.[/quote]

True but fishforums,aquariumboard ,simplydiscus,and tetra all use vbulletin  and those are all likely seen overall by more people then the forums any of us run.

[quote] SMF in my opinion is likely to go 'paid subcription' or something in the way of Invision [/quote] Don't see it happening keeping it free they're makeing enough from their "charter members" and google advertiseing and with their statements like "it will always be free" if they went paid they'd probally kill their own idea - been free over 5 years already.

[Mark Stone]

[quote]How to you mean?
Like change or add to the news box?
or mailing people through the forum?[/quote]On the old VB I used to be able to write an announcement and it would appear as a sticky on the top of every forum. For example, to announce things like the photo contests, announcements about new mods, etc. I could set it to automatically start/stop on certain dates, etc. I haven't found that feature on SMF (Notice I said I haven't found it - not that it doesn't exist). That's what I was referring to - - 

[DanRad]

This one seems somehow quicker and slicker.  I like the feel of it!