2011-04-21, 02:19 AM
Hi all,
My site has had a few different forums over the years and been through many iterations. We started on phpBB, went to e107 and their inbuilt forums, I then moved us to SMF (which was something I wish I had never done)
Basically each move was based around the site growing and needing a better platform. When it first started it was just a forum, then we had a need for news and this is why we moved to a CMS/Portal.
Once we outgrew that portal we moved to Joomla, which has been great for the site and SEO.
Over the past year my site has almost doubled in active users and things have exploded somewhat. Whilst I can't make a living out of it, it does offer some small assistance in running itself.
Anyway when the site started to grow, during in peak times we would be inundated and the site would eventually crash. This lead us from server to server and VPS to VPS until we recently moved to a VPS that seems to suit our needs.
This stopped a lot of the crashes however there were still a few minor ones occurring during peak times.
I overhauled the scripts in the site and spent a lot of time on analysis. I had done everything I could possibly think of to improve the performance of my forums but SMF just wasn't built with server performance in mind.
And I didn't feel like a complete overhaul of many of the queries that needed fixing.
This brings me to myBB. I had been keeping an eye on the project for a while and had liked what I had seen, very clean forums, always seem fast on every site I visit and it obviously had some resemblances to other commercial quality boards.
So I assessed 3 options
1 - MyBB
2 - vBulletin (I have some experience with this)
3 - IP.Board
Now I have been in the forum game since UBB was the most popular and IkonBoard and Yabb were also around.
I know vbulletin used to be a fantastic forum and it was top of my list, but after doing some work for some forum owners I decided that the new owners likely have taken it in a direction that is counter to the community. There were more grumbles and groans than people saying v4 was good. As such I struck it off my list.
Next came IP, Now I remember when invision was free and actually thought it was quite good back then. I was very close to actually purchasing this forum, and believe of the commercial forums, this is one of the best out there. In fact I was literally going to buy it within a day or two and then I decided to revisit myBB
I thought about it, ran a few conversions to see how it went. There were a few issues but overall it was relatively simple enough if not slow (I have a fairly large post base that people still review and dredge up and am a firm believer in not removing old forum posts because they provide a good content history)
Once I was happy with it, I decided to let a few of my users over to test it, the response was overwhelmingly favourable and I decided, that why not keep the $150 in my pocket and at least give myBB a go for a few months, if it was no good I could easily just move over to one of the other forums.
And thus I find myself on myBB. There are a few little things I need to get used to and I have had to write a few custom plugins to get some features back, but over all I am amazed at how lightweight and fast the forum is.
My server load rarely gets above 1 and I have not seen memory usage of more than 7.5MB.
Very impressed.
Anyway my site is about a Rugby League team in Australia. http://www.silvertails.net is the homepage and the forums can be found at http://forums.silvertails.net
Nothing fancy to the design I wanted it fairly vanilla with a few minor colour changes and sitting within my Joomla layout so there is cohesion in design across the site.
Dan
My site has had a few different forums over the years and been through many iterations. We started on phpBB, went to e107 and their inbuilt forums, I then moved us to SMF (which was something I wish I had never done)
Basically each move was based around the site growing and needing a better platform. When it first started it was just a forum, then we had a need for news and this is why we moved to a CMS/Portal.
Once we outgrew that portal we moved to Joomla, which has been great for the site and SEO.
Over the past year my site has almost doubled in active users and things have exploded somewhat. Whilst I can't make a living out of it, it does offer some small assistance in running itself.
Anyway when the site started to grow, during in peak times we would be inundated and the site would eventually crash. This lead us from server to server and VPS to VPS until we recently moved to a VPS that seems to suit our needs.
This stopped a lot of the crashes however there were still a few minor ones occurring during peak times.
I overhauled the scripts in the site and spent a lot of time on analysis. I had done everything I could possibly think of to improve the performance of my forums but SMF just wasn't built with server performance in mind.
And I didn't feel like a complete overhaul of many of the queries that needed fixing.
This brings me to myBB. I had been keeping an eye on the project for a while and had liked what I had seen, very clean forums, always seem fast on every site I visit and it obviously had some resemblances to other commercial quality boards.
So I assessed 3 options
1 - MyBB
2 - vBulletin (I have some experience with this)
3 - IP.Board
Now I have been in the forum game since UBB was the most popular and IkonBoard and Yabb were also around.
I know vbulletin used to be a fantastic forum and it was top of my list, but after doing some work for some forum owners I decided that the new owners likely have taken it in a direction that is counter to the community. There were more grumbles and groans than people saying v4 was good. As such I struck it off my list.
Next came IP, Now I remember when invision was free and actually thought it was quite good back then. I was very close to actually purchasing this forum, and believe of the commercial forums, this is one of the best out there. In fact I was literally going to buy it within a day or two and then I decided to revisit myBB
I thought about it, ran a few conversions to see how it went. There were a few issues but overall it was relatively simple enough if not slow (I have a fairly large post base that people still review and dredge up and am a firm believer in not removing old forum posts because they provide a good content history)
Once I was happy with it, I decided to let a few of my users over to test it, the response was overwhelmingly favourable and I decided, that why not keep the $150 in my pocket and at least give myBB a go for a few months, if it was no good I could easily just move over to one of the other forums.
And thus I find myself on myBB. There are a few little things I need to get used to and I have had to write a few custom plugins to get some features back, but over all I am amazed at how lightweight and fast the forum is.
My server load rarely gets above 1 and I have not seen memory usage of more than 7.5MB.
Very impressed.
Anyway my site is about a Rugby League team in Australia. http://www.silvertails.net is the homepage and the forums can be found at http://forums.silvertails.net
Nothing fancy to the design I wanted it fairly vanilla with a few minor colour changes and sitting within my Joomla layout so there is cohesion in design across the site.
Dan