just installed invisionboard my feedback

[s2kinteg916]

I know matt is a great coder because i use to use ib than i went to vbulletin. Wow!! invisionboard has gone a long way i been a long time vbulletin user and never changed but decided to go free do to budget reasons for a new site and im really shocked what a great product invision has made. Their search feature still sucks but for 0.00 i cant really complain. This has a ton of features compared to what i was expecting, install was like a 2 step process, and easy to navigate as well. It also seems super fast i think it only does like 8-10 queries to a database.

I just looked at it looks like they redid some of their search features too... Whew!!! couldnt be happier

[Mike]

Yeah i've always liked invisionboard. Think if I do setup a forum for a site I will move to PHPbb, I really like their layout.

[Percept]

Invisionboard has allways been my favorite ( free ) forumsoftware.

vBulletin is going to have to watch out for the Invision guys.

[s2kinteg916]

their search still seems to suck i cant search for any topics on their community for help at all. That does help with post count because people would have to post since they cant search for it lol

A couple things are a bit outta place and to confusing as well.

[s2kinteg916]

Just wanted to add its kinda difficult or time consuming to change the colors in ipb. It takes seconds in vbulletin

These i think is awesome
[ Script Execution time: 0.0875 ] [ 6 queries used ] [ GZIP Enabled ]

[megamanXplosion]

changing colors on IPB isn't hard, most of the formatting is in the CSS. If you know CSS, you can change the colors. In fact, you do not even need to know CSS, they have a nice color-picker type tool in the admin CP that will modify the CSS for you :)

IPB is definately my favorite forum software. I've tried phpBB and it's pretty much skin-and-bones in terms of features and I don't want to hack in 200 features that other message board systems have by default. Not to mention that I had a lot of my members view the phpBB installation and they all had trouble finding their way around, most notable is the trouble they had with registering and modifying their account. That was the last straw for me and phpBB. If users are gonna have to look around for 5 minutes to figure out how to register, then it's obvious that a large amount of potential members will not register and that is bad, very bad.

vBulletin is nice, but I find that the way they parse topics can take a huge toll on server resources, plus I found their skinning system overly difficult (I haven't tried 3.0, btw, this is speaking from my knowledge of the 2.x series) to use. I remember trying to make a skin for my last host in exchange for more server space. I ended up just making a bunch of static HTML pages and giving them to him and told him to hack them up and put them in the relevant sections. The vBulletin skinning system is too damn hard to use. I think I should also point out that I'm usually not the 'change-colors-be-happy' person, I like to extensively change things.

Invision Power Board has been, so far, the best message board system that I have found. Unfortunately, I think they are moving backwards quite a bit with 2.0 in terms of the interface (both forum and admin CP). It's just too 'boxy' and things are arranged weirdly. I'm afraid that their interface is starting to turn into an interface similar to phpBB, but even more complicated. I'm also disappointed with the arrangement of items in the skinning section of the admin CP, it's very strange. Not to mention the incompatibility with Opera, so I'd have to use IE/FireFox to administrate my board, very counter-productive. Of course, it is still in the development stages and the skin is not complete, so I'm hoping that these issues are sorted out by the time it goes final. I do like the fact that it has a better caching system for database queries though, and they've finally fixed the external-CSS feature so that the CSS would cache properly in Internet Explorer (you'll notice on my message board, link in sig, that I've modified it to use my own self-created CSS file so that IE can cache it). I'm also loving the multi-moderation INSIDE of topics so that I can delete multiple posts at one time instead of one by one by one. I'm stretched in two directions for IPB 2.0 and I'm curious if an upgrade would be a wise thing to do. I'm hesitantly waiting for the final release to see how things will come out.

So far, I'd say that Invision Power Board 1.3 is my favorite.

[nohaber]

At the moment I am playin with mercuryboard and it looks promising(on my local comp). I'll put it online tomorrow. So far it is really easy to setup and customize it. It's also search engine friendly. And of course, it is free.