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  • Forum Software

    I've been shopping around for forum software and have come to one major conclusion: the apps all look basically the same. The differences in price don't seem to make sense to me, so I'm wondering. Are you running discussion-board software, and if you are, how did you settle on the app you're using?

    Right now, I'm playing around with phpBB, which is open-source and FREE and seems to do most of what vBulletin (the app Ryan's using for HawaiiThreads) does. I don't know if it's as customizable, which is certainly an issue, but am I missing something when I don't see too many other differences?
    But I'm disturbed! I'm depressed! I'm inadequate! I GOT IT ALL! (George Costanza)
    GrouchyTeacher.com

  • #2
    Re: Forum Software

    There are a lot of differences, IMHO. Though I might be saying that simply because I've messed with half a dozen different software packages in addition to the one HawaiiThreads.com runs on, and ultimately made the leap to use a commercial solution despite a multitude of free alternatives out there.

    Besides, I think some of the similarities are pretty unavoidable, because of the conventions that dictate what people expect when they visit a web forum. Most blogs look the same, no matter what program or site you use to make it, and there are conventions in shopping and news sites as well. If a forum had a wholly unique and cutting-edge interface, you have to imagine some folks simply wouldn't know what to do with it.

    phpBB is now the only other setup I use besides vBulletin, when cost is an issue, and I still run a handful of boards for web clients. Also in the free space is YaBB. The setup that looks most promising to me now is Invision Powerboard, but whether or not it's free depends on what your definition of "free software" is if you're not going to license it. In the commercial space, UBB is pretty much the other big player besides vBulletin.

    I can tell you right now, stay far, far away from Ikonboard, which was both a dog to install and ultimately turned out to be the biggest security hole I ever had on a server -- hackers still occasionally hammer my sites looking for forums that are no longer there, and once they did get in and delete a good chunk of my sites.

    What's the difference between all these? Lots.

    How is the look customized? Almost all phpBB fora look identical. vBulletin would let me give each individual forum/subform a completely different look if I wanted to (allowing me to give the Hawaii Media section its own header, for starters).

    How is the site administered? How are users managed? Even if a forum looks great on the front end, some make you do some pretty ridiculous things behind the scenes to moderate posts, move threads, etc. And not only does vBulletin let me mess with things via a special administration area, but it makes a number of tools available in the "front end" (that only admins can see), making day-to-day upkeep incredibly efficient.

    Is there e-mail integration, private messaging, calendering, chat? I actually don't like that most CMSes try to offer everything, but for some these goodies are key to user retention.

    And a big one is the architecture. Does it use MySQL or some other database, or just flat text files? How are pages rendered? Two forum packages might present sites that look exactly the same, but one will use ten times the bandwidth and server time than the other. The reason I chose vBulletin over UBB is because while both can handle huge loads (forums with easily twenty times the userbase and activity of HawaiiThreads.com), UBB is simply inefficient and would exhaust a bandwidth limit far faster than vBulletin.

    Support is also a biggie, and why I went commercial. Related to that is security, and constant updates and prompt patches. Open source and free software is great, so long as you have that large, devoted and active community of folks working to keep things up to date and make things better. Sadly, in my experience (so far), you get what you pay for.

    Though we're just a little `ohana right now, I set up HawaiiThreads.com to be a standalone, general discussion forum with lots of capabilities and possibilities for the future. But who knows if we'll ever really put the system through its paces? If you just want a forum set up with minimal fuss that just augments an existing site or community - say, a forum for your chess club or a forum for your tech news site - I'd go with phpBB.

    By the way... for those of you out there who like this kind of stuff but can't or don't want to deal with webhosting, there are fully-hosted solutions out there too. Bravenet, EZBoard, Proboards, ForumCo.com... And depending on how broadly you define "web forum," there's always the trusty Yahoo! Groups service.

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    • #3
      Re: Forum Software

      Wow. That was a heck of an answer. My ambition in life is to know what all of those words meant.

      Thanks for the advice--I now have a few more places to check. For my immediate purposes, I've decided that phpBB is going to work just fine until I figure out what else I want, if anything. I will only have about six active users, plus a few passive observers, and phpBB's permission-setting does exactly what I require.

      The free-hosted options weren't options for me; I am a teacher at a school, and if I don't have any control over the advertising that my students are exposed to on a school-administered site, I simply won't take my students there.

      In the future, if I should decide to help other teachers set up similar online classroom-thingies, I may need to consider something more commercial, but I'll worry about that bridge as I get swept beneath it.

      You are the MAN.
      Last edited by scrivener; August 12, 2004, 01:30 PM.
      But I'm disturbed! I'm depressed! I'm inadequate! I GOT IT ALL! (George Costanza)
      GrouchyTeacher.com

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      • #4
        Re: Forum Software

        It has been a year since I first looked at forum software, and my continued participation on HawaiiThreads has been as much study as socializing. From the user end, I must say that Ryan has vBulletin running beautifully; it is basically the standard against which I compare others, not only in its mechanics and aesthetics, but in its management, too. Helen and Mel have done a lot for my understanding of how these things thrive and survive, and fellow posters like those in the top ten of the motormouth thread have helped me understand the dynamics that keep a place like this breathing.

        I ran phpBB for my literature students, using the forum software as an online replacement for the sectioned spiral notebook I'd used in my classroom for years. It has a few disadvantages, of course, but my students' responses have been unanimously positive. Losing a spiral would be a grade-destroyer in the past, but the only real danger most students encounter now is hardware problems. On the other hand, using different fora within phpBB as replacements for the sections in the spiral notebook has been pleasantly educational for me and for my students. They can see what others are writing (for you educators, I am a huge fan of Vygotsky's Zones of Proximal Development, and this has been lovely for the Zones!), and I can get a look at several students' responses at once.

        This has also enabled me to add to the assignment in ways I never could; for example, I have a discussion area where once a week, I post one question about the current literature, and my students post their reponses to it, right beneath my question, so at a glance, they can see how their opinions match up with their classmates'. For fun (and fun is a critical element of this assignment), I also post Five Random Questions each week, and the students seem to enjoy reading each others' (and my) responses.

        I'm slowly beginning to require little practice posts, where I introduce some new feature in the software and they put it to use; this, I hope, will enhance their enjoyment of and effective use of the software (those smilies, for example).

        The permissions settings allow me also to have private areas for discussion with my students in their free-writing. In the past, this has been the best part of the assignment -- the part of the spiral where students write whatever they want, and I respond; we keep a running dialogue sometimes, and I've seen students use this part of the assignment to get through their parents' divorces, to explore changing group dynamics with friends, and to gripe about tough teachers, difficult course-work, and unreasonable parents. I miss being able to put little happy faces or exclamation marks right on my students' work, but just attaching a reply seems to work almost as well.

        My students are mostly dyslexic, and some have grapho-motor difficulties that make writing in a notebook very, very difficult. Keyboarding seems to be much, much easier for most of them than writing, so I'm getting the quantity I prefer and they've been told that while I insist they write in English (and not with U and TX and LOL), I am not concerned with grammar, punctuation, or spelling on this assignment; this seems to have freed them to explore the literature at least as much as I want them to.

        I haven't yet taught a student (in this course) with the kind of grapho-motor difficulties that make even keyboarding prohibitive; when I do (and it could be next year), I'll have to make a decision. I'm considering two options: First, allowing students to podcast their journal entries, and second, making sure the student has decent voice-to-text software and then making sure he or she has enough time to do the assignment, because it will almost certainly take longer.

        The increased ubiquitousness of free WiFi and the fact that most of my English students have their own laptops (four of six last year and seven of seven this year) makes for exciting possibilities in taking this assignment further; I'm interested in hitting the road with them, participating in some activity and then sitting right down to explore it in our writing. Additionally, students who've had to miss classes because they've been on trips have been able to (when they've wanted) update their journals from wherever they are. I'd like to find some way to take advantage of this kind of mobility and interconnectedness.

        Next up for me, besides continuing this assignment and articulating exactly what I hope my students will gain from it, is to review the literature and see what other teachers have done with this technology, and then possibly to make my own contribution to the scholarly discourse. That's probably not for another year, though.

        Also up for me next: After Ryan's very helpful feedback above, I looked around a bit more and my LAN guy suggested SimpleForum Pro, which for twenty bucks does a nice, simple forum, which I'm now running as a discussion area for my colleagues. For now, it will serve mostly as a bulletin board, but I've created areas for discussion on current topics and for separate departments to have virtual meetings. Don't know where this is going just yet, but the goals (set not by me but by a committee I'm on) are increased camaraderie first and increased communication second. We'll see.

        Anyway, thanks for being my little practice room; I've learned a lot from you all and while I seriously doubt anyone has read this far, I'd like you to know I'm grateful.
        Last edited by scrivener; September 22, 2005, 09:40 PM. Reason: "Now you're messin' with a . . ."
        But I'm disturbed! I'm depressed! I'm inadequate! I GOT IT ALL! (George Costanza)
        GrouchyTeacher.com

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        • #5
          Re: Forum Software

          Originally posted by scrivener
          Also up for me next: After Ryan's very helpful feedback above, I looked around a bit more and my LAN guy suggested SimpleForum Pro, which for twenty bucks does a nice, simple forum, which I'm now running as a discussion area for my colleagues. For now, it will serve mostly as a bulletin board, but I've created areas for discussion on current topics and for separate departments to have virtual meetings.
          First of all let me tell you that if I was a kid, I probably would like to have you as a teacher. Or at least the technology that is deployed nowdays to make interaction between students and teachers a little more easier and accessible.

          That said, this reply will probably not help you much, but I had to add that I ran the original version of Simple Forum basic on the old Hawaii Radio & Television Guide Message Board site. I found Simple Forum to be very easy to deploy and maintain, though it has its limitations. In the free version there was no way to implement a registration system (which was the main reason why I moved here to HawaiiThreads), and the paid version at the time I think was just getting started.

          I think SimpleForum will probably work better for you in a closed environment vs. a huge open environment where more traffic would utitlize the system.

          I've been and am a member of a few other message board systems, and these days I gravitate to those running this vBulletin software. I think it is the best system for running a popular public access site such as this.

          Ryan has done an excellent job of keeping this place running... no major problems (except for a couple of outages beyond his control), very good interaction with the major operating systems (Windows versions, Mac OS versions) and browsers.
          I'm still here. Are you?

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          • #6
            Re: Forum Software

            As some of you know, phpBB is set to release v3.0 (the last stable release was phpBB2.0.22). It's in release candidate 4 right now, and the buzz has been really good. I decided to go ahead and install the upgrade last night when I was supposed to be working on other things, and it was a great experience. Previous upgrades involved opening certain files and editing the php and uploading the changes -- an enormous pain sometimes, especially if you happened to miss an upgrade or two and found yourself having to jump a few releases at a time.

            The new installer is very wizard-like, and while not as ridiculously easy as the installer for WordPress, surprisingly user-friendly. I did a backup of the MySQL database and MOST of the files and then just uploaded the new package right into the same directory the old version was already in -- I didn't have to remove a thing. This saved me a bit of work, because I've got other folders in that directory to which some of my posts in the forum are linked. Since the upgrade preserved all my posts, the links still work without my having had to move or translate anything. Nice.

            Ran the install script and then the upgrade script, and everything's there: old messages, all my users, and most of my customizations. The only major thing that doesn't make the transfer is style templates, but I see that as almost necessary, because the look and feel of phpBB3.0 is pretty different.

            What I like best is that most of the obvious improvements are in the backend, where the administrative control panel is almost a completely new creation. I can't believe how well laid-out the management options are now. Very cool.

            Styles are now separated into "templates" and "themes," where the templates folder of any style contains the html and the themes folder contains the css. I haven't seen this fully taken advantage of just yet, because there aren't a ton of third-party styles available just yet, but you can see how this could be really, really cool: Ideally, you could install just the templates of a style you like and keep the colors, graphics, and fonts of the style you're already using. I'm sure it won't work that smoothly all the time, but the potential is there, especially if some standard exists. Standards probably already do exist and I just don't know it. I'm definitely going to play with this in the next few days.

            I spent a LOT of time customizing styles for my students over the past few years; reconstructing those could be a major pain, but I'm not going to sweat it for now. I'll set up something I like and tweak it as the school year progresses; I usually don't do regular style changes for my students (weekly changes just to keep their interest up) until after the Thanksgiving weekend.

            If you're running phpBB2.0.x, I highly recommend upgrading right now. This new version feels quite stable and I won't be surprised if it goes gold very soon.
            But I'm disturbed! I'm depressed! I'm inadequate! I GOT IT ALL! (George Costanza)
            GrouchyTeacher.com

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