Any power user of vBulletin knows that it’s one of the best forum scripts out there – and the best forums tend to use it too.
However once you start using it alot even vBulletin comes up short.
Tag: vbulletin
Thanks to the Black Hat community not keeping a lid on their activities I’ve been made aware of a spamming system targetted at the DigitalPoint forums. It can, however, be used on any vBulletin forum – I would assume. Some have implemented different rules around when you can send a private message, and some might even have captcha – but it’s all circumventable.
Some points from a discussion on setting up a new forum.
The steps to take to get started and make it successful:
I’m a moderator on a few forums, one phpBB and the rest are vBulletin. One was a surprise – I hadn’t realised until I started getting reported posts 😉
Personally I find the vBulletin forums better to moderate than phpBB but it’s a relatively close call – until you start banning people and looking for cheats. Then vBulletin comes into it’s own.
A great many vBulletin forum owners appear to be unaware that their forums can provide an RSS feed “out of the box”.
This is a great shame because it limits the forums ability to grow and have visibility.
Now the naysayers will say one of two things
- I don’t want people stealing my content
- I want people to visit the forum and if they use feeds they might not (usually because of ad revenue)
The reality is that there are a great many forums out there all competing for the same users and you need to use every competitive advantage there is. In vBulletin it’s things like allowing users to subscribe to daily digests of posts to a forum. Pretty much the same thing result as an RSS feed but it’s turned on by default and forum owners don’t proactively turn it off.
On a whim I decided to purchase the domain Top 100 vBulletin and put a wsnlinks directory on the site to rank vBulletin forums.
The only requirement is that External Data is turned on giving me access to external.php.
I’m then ranking the forums based on
- Number of threads
- Ratings by visitors to the directory
- Google’s PR