Can I have some suggestions about the best and most secure (to help with spammers) forum software.
I have a forum running at the moment with Simple Machines and it’s getting hit left, right and centre even with a lot of spam filters and capture.
I want to start a new one from scratch and lock it down as much as possible with as much admin control for member approval as possible too. It had to be as secure as possible as some of the spam thats hit the forum is pretty bad content and the client is worried as they are in the national press and it only takes one to see it!
I’ve taken a look round Vanilla and think it looks pretty good. It has a nice theme which embeds into a site which would be perfect.
The pricing starts at $49 per month ($588 per year) which might put the client off a little (I could work on that), but will have to offer an alternative solution too.
Apart from Vanilla which I believe the be the best one that I have seen, are there any other recommendations?
I’m running now nearly a year the “German FWT” with vanilla on my page. This is the free version so basically I don’t see any deeper reason to switch to the paid one (that I couldn’t afford btw).
Installing:
As far as I remember not that big deal. It is important to have a host that accepts running .htaccess.
Integration:
Simple, just a few lines of code - buuuuut:
This causes, that the forum is running somewhere within a frame and this caused some backlink issues (facebook and notification eMails). I haven’t had the time and head to work this out - but I think it would be much better to build a template from scratch - following the to match page. This requires a deeper knowledge of the vanilla structure that is similar to some other things so called .tpl files (header, content, footer) that are finally sticked together in an index-page.
Security
The registration process is including captcha however there are always bad guys that find a way to hack this. It seems to be not to avoid so I have from time to time sort them out. Not a big deal but a bit annoying.
All in all I’m happy (and proud) that I found that solution. The german community is not that heavy but there is an average activity. The SEO aspect is pretty nice and google ranking is brilliant for those keywords I expect (FreewayTalk german deutsch you know).
Updating
Yet a nightmare for me personal. I’m fear of loosing stuff so I’m actually on the “never stop a running engine” side of life.
I recommend to have a look at the free version to play with it. You can later always switch on the supported one if you want.
Vanilla is available in two versions – Free Open Source and Paid Service. You can download the Vanilla software to your server, install it, and run it there for zero dollars (hosting not included). The price you pay for this is reading Welling and Thomson’s fat book and understanding PHP and MySQL to the extent that you need to install it and administer it. You also want to spend a bit of time each week or month updating to the latest version to keep ahead of any newly-discovered holes. (That $588 starts to look really reasonable when you divide it by your hourly rate, doesn’t it?)
On Jan 17, 2012, at 3:55 AM, Thomas Kimmich wrote:
Hi Nathan,
probably worth to have a few words here.
I’m running now nearly a year the “German FWT” with vanilla on my page. This is the free version so basically I don’t see any deeper reason to switch to the paid one (that I couldn’t afford btw).
Installing:
As far as I remember not that big deal. It is important to have a host that accepts running .htaccess.
Integration:
Simple, just a few lines of code - buuuuut:
This causes, that the forum is running somewhere within a frame and this caused some backlink issues (facebook and notification eMails). I haven’t had the time and head to work this out - but I think it would be much better to build a template from scratch - following the to match page. This requires a deeper knowledge of the vanilla structure that is similar to some other things so called .tpl files (header, content, footer) that are finally sticked together in an index-page.
Security
The registration process is including captcha however there are always bad guys that find a way to hack this. It seems to be not to avoid so I have from time to time sort them out. Not a big deal but a bit annoying.
All in all I’m happy (and proud) that I found that solution. The german community is not that heavy but there is an average activity. The SEO aspect is pretty nice and google ranking is brilliant for those keywords I expect (FreewayTalk german deutsch you know).
Updating
Yet a nightmare for me personal. I’m fear of loosing stuff so I’m actually on the “never stop a running engine” side of life.
I recommend to have a look at the free version to play with it. You can later always switch on the supported one if you want.