The Rod Refuge Forums Software Conundrum

I’ve been con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of set­ting up a gen­eral street rod/hot rod forum for well over a year. I’ve been very for­tu­nate with The T-Bucket Forums and have watched them grow beyond my wildest expec­ta­tions. I’ve felt if I set up a gen­eral hot rod forum site and ran it with the same prin­ci­ples as the T-bucket site, we might see light­ning strike twice.

A week ago today, the Rod Refuge Forums were born.

I gave the site a lot of con­sid­er­a­tion, but I also gave the forum soft­ware a lot of con­sid­er­a­tion.  I have a cou­ple of unused Invi­sion Power Board licenses and IP.Content licenses, but I also had four unused vBul­letin 3.8 licenses, a cou­ple of vBSEO licenses and a cou­ple of GARS licenses.

I fig­ured I could set the site up on Invi­sion soft­ware, which would lead to has­sles try­ing to get tech­ni­cal arti­cles appear­ing in IP.Content and would also be a royal pain try­ing to get the allegedly inte­grated Invi­sion sitemap gen­er­a­tor they refer to as IP.SEO working.

Or, I could set things up with vBul­letin, vBSEO and GARS.  And, as you can see, I went with the lat­ter option.

GARS can be added to a vBul­letin forum in a mat­ter of min­utes and forums can be con­fig­ured into Arti­cle, Review or Tuto­r­ial forums with a sin­gle mouse click.  Which beats the pants off the sev­eral months I spent try­ing to get IP.Content to work as a sim­ple arti­cles library on the T-Bucket site.

vBSEO and the vBSEO Sitemap Gen­er­a­tor are installed in a mat­ter of min­utes are are both highly-customizable.  I was able to con­fig­ure the URL struc­ture I wanted with a sin­gle mouse click, rather than hav­ing to edit core files, as I would have had to do with Invi­sion Power Board.  And my GARS forums share a sim­il­iar URL struc­ture, with­out any extra work.  The vBSEO Sitemap Gen­er­a­tor sim­ply works, right out of the tin, quite unlike the IP.SEO appli­ca­tion devel­oped by the Invi­sion coders.

Yes, vBul­letin 3.8 is at End Of Life.  Which means that fork of the tree is dry­ing up.  But I know of one, rather pop­u­lar auto­mo­tive forum that is still run­ning on vBul­letin 3.0.7, so I think I can keep a copy of 3.8 run­ning for a while.  And the lat­est and great­est Invi­sion soft­ware works about as well as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.  I have one forum run­ning IP.Board 3.2.2 and IP.SEO 1.5.0, but they only work together after TWO Invi­sion coders worked on the IP.SEO script.  Another forum is suc­ces­fully run­ning IP.Board 3.2.1 and IP.SEO 1.5.0 Beta.  And they only inte­grate and work prop­erly after an Invi­sion coder worked on the IP.SEO script.  I would like to upgrade, but that same Invi­sion coder has yet to make the fixes to the IP.SEO pack­age, so I would be upgrad­ing into another ver­sion of Invi­sion Hell.

If new Invi­sion soft­ware wants to play up, I’ve absolutely no prob­lem using older and EOL vBul­letin soft­ware I know will work.  If the con­ver­sion back from IP.Board to vBul­letin didn’t involve a lot of user-password trauma, I would have tossed Invi­sion into the bin 10 months ago.  But I do know one thing is cer­tain.  If I set up any new forum sites, Invi­sion will be my absolute last choice for forum soft­ware.  I’ll use MyBB or SMF soft­ware before I ever spend another nickel on Invi­sion licenses.

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Tagged as: Invision, IP.Content, IP.SEO, Rod Refuge Forums, T-Bucket Forums, vBSEO, vBulletin