Switching to new forum software

[rbcp]

You should install Vanilla forums instead.. I've just started using another forum which uses Vanilla and it really helps a lot with bypasses the aging, outdated forum problem

It updates the forum format to a 2.0 style

http://phonelosers.com/vanilla/

I set up Vanilla, just to see what it's like.  I don't really see what's "2.0" about it.  It seems kind of featureless, really.  There aren't a lot of plugins or themes for it and I'm not sure what switching to it would achieve.  Feel free to set up an account on it and make a bunch of posts and try to convince me I'm wrong.

Also, the tool that imports data from other forums doesn't support SMF v2.x yet, so I can't move posts/users to it.  There is support for SMF v1.x so I would think 2.x is coming eventually.  I wonder if I could import to some other forum software and then import that to Vanilla.

I'm all for switching to something new.  We've been using SMF for about 6 years now and a fresh look would be kind of nice.  I doubt that switching to anything will change the fact that the forums everywhere are kind of dead these days, but I'm still willing to do it.  I'm just not sure Vanilla is the best thing for us.

About all the old posts on these forums - no matter what we switch to, I will always keep these posts up somewhere.  If I have to keep SMF up separately, I will do that.  I promise not to EvilCal our old posts.  It'd be nice if whatever new software we move to could just import the old stuff, but I'm fine with just creating an archive of them too.

It might be a good idea to start fresh, just because the MySQL database file is currently 55 megs.  I don't know if I huge file size eventually slows things down on a MySQL database.  Does it?

[markov]

From what I understand, the larger the mysql database the higher the tendency to slow things down.. but I'm not sure how large it has to be before that begins happening. It also makes it harder to do backups and restores when needed.

In my experience running forums, things tend to get a bit wonky when the database gets larger and there are a lot of plugins/mods installed, but the forum here seems to have always been running great for me.

Thanks for taking the time to setup vanilla.. maybe there's another option that is better if people don't like it. I'm on a super active forum that uses vanilla right now (i can barely even keep up with the threads its so busy) and its kinda hard to explain why it feels more "2.0" until you jump into it.

It has some small features such as making use of the "@" notification setup, like twitter and a bunch of other 2.0 sites. So if I'm making a post/reply and I mention @rbcp in the post txt, it will notify you that you have been tagged in the post.

It also notifies you when people have replied to your posts in the same way, kinda like you get notifications on facebook.

And the profile setup is a little more like a 2.0 setup.

The main thing that I like about it other than that stuff is it just looks a lot sleeker and less outdated, but I'm sure there are other features I don't really know about yet

[markov]

Oh, and I tried to register an account but it looks like the captcha setup needs an API before it will let me

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