starting a forum - follow me

[idoit]

never heard about outsourcing?

i live in a country that get's outsourced

 

[tooslim]

Got SMF up and running on my site. Ive created the sections of the forum. Im looking for a Theme Designer and Logo designer

 

[gianni]

SMF is horrible.

What he said.
SMF is a piece of shit.

It has tons of vulnerabilities. From ability to scrape emails from active users, to SEVERE design flaws that make it highly exposed to DDOS attacks, to XSS vulnerabilities in admin panel not fixed for months now (althought this could of had changed).

It's like SMF authors don't even give a damn about member security at all. I mean seriously, did you even know your email as a member is exposed on like 2 different places?! and I don't mean as an admin but as as petty forum guest!

It also lacks features severely. Like appointing how many posts per page you want to show, a cool subscription feature like vbulletin, caching (yes, it sucks cock in caching) and I could go on and on.

large forum = vbulletin no doubt OR heavily modified SMF. and I mean HEAVILY modified inside the .php code, not just throw in a couple of mods from their community site.

If you do decide to stick with smf then here's two sites for themes you may like.

http://www.dzinerstudio.com/
http://www.jpr62.com/theme/index.php?action=downloads;cat=4
and ofcourse their own community repository, but those themes suck big time.

 

[Dothra]

What he said.
SMF is a piece of sh%it.

It has tons of vulnerabilities. From ability to scrape emails from active users, to SEVERE design flaws that make it highly exposed to DDOS attacks, to XSS vulnerabilities in admin panel not fixed for months now (althought this could of had changed).

It also lacks features severely. Like appointing how many posts per page you want to show, a cool subscription feature like vbulletin, caching (yes, it sucks co%ck in caching) and I could go on and on.

large forum = vbulletin no doubt OR heavily modified SMF. and I mean HEAVILY modified inside the .php code, not just throw in a couple of mods from their community site.

Implying that you cannot scrape emails from a forum running vBulletin...
SMF isn't so bad, I think you've just had a bad experience with it, and SMF is a good forum software to use to start up at least, and in the future he can always convert to vBulletin if he receives enough members.

 

[tooslim]

What he said.
SMF is a piece of shit.

It has tons of vulnerabilities. From ability to scrape emails from active users, to SEVERE design flaws that make it highly exposed to DDOS attacks, to XSS vulnerabilities in admin panel not fixed for months now (althought this could of had changed).

It's like SMF authors don't even give a damn about member security at all. I mean seriously, did you even know your email as a member is exposed on like 2 different places?! and I don't mean as an admin but as as petty forum guest!

It also lacks features severely. Like appointing how many posts per page you want to show, a cool subscription feature like vbulletin, caching (yes, it sucks cock in caching) and I could go on and on.

large forum = vbulletin no doubt OR heavily modified SMF. and I mean HEAVILY modified inside the .php code, not just throw in a couple of mods from their community site.

If you do decide to stick with smf then here's two sites for themes you may like.

Besides vBulliten what do you recommend then

 

[bmatthews]

Good luck with starting one.

In my experience, the hardest part is convincing people that the forum is active. Once you can do that, you've got an active forum.

 

[gianni]

Im not talking about scraping emails from member list.

I'm talking about your email being plain exposed regardless you choose to show it to others or not. Even if admin disables the display they are still reachable. You don't even have to be registered. You can see them AS A GUEST.


With vbulletin a multithreaded bot will spend like 5 minutes to scrape 100-200 emails, with smf I can scrape THE ENTIRE database mail list in just few seconds.

See the difference?


True, smf isn't "that" bad, but it's far from good.
It started as a "hobby" project when it was first created. Problem is it remained that way.

Don't get me wrong, I still use smf for my hobby stuff except I have a custom written module that corrects stuff like that.

Even with that I would never use SMF for a large scale project where security matters. I don't trust it and authors haven't done much to persuade me otherwise either.

Also, remember the situation just few months ago where anyone could gain FULL access to your webhost through SMF avatar exploit?

Boy am I glad I never got hit back with that back then. Some of my friends did and it ended in a colossal mess for them.

@tooslim
there's phpbb, mybb, ipboard

First two are free (don't really like them), ipboard is payable.

 

[tooslim]

ok so now i dont want to use SMF.
whats my next best bet? phpbb? mybb?

 

[scrapefox]

MyBB.

I personally prefer it over phpbb, but the main reason I'm suggesting it is the ease of installing plugins on it.

phpbb may have changed since I last used it, but I remember there being a lot of template edits to install an addon; where mybb, for the most part, there's none.

 

[tooslim]

so what im thinking is installing mybb temporarily and then switching to ipboard after a few months

 

[crazychatlink]

Tell us if you already started your forum, you may also want to do referrals. That would double you members quickly.

 

[tooslim]

Looking for an age restriction mod or plugin for myBB. I want it to be 18+ only and couldnt find an option for that

 

[RTM77]

I downloaded something from here called nanocontinuity, I didn't finish it yet but should at least give you some ideas. It's about continuity programs with small payments.

 

[tooslim]

I need to get some SEO done now. Since its a forum should i be doing something different? i plan on outsourcing all this work so if YOU have experience ranking a Forum please PM me!
Also thinking about outsourcing some of the work to fiverr. anyone have some great gigs?


Also im going to be looking for some people to start posting on the forum. Its related to Medical Marijuana so if you are interested please PM me and ill send you the link

 

[tooslim]

Also looking for Graphic artist to design a logo for the forum

 

[Deleted member 110025]

 

[tooslim]

 

[findecko]

if u want to get users faster i suggest u to use vBulletin becaose vBulletin forums look more serious and people like them

 

[tooslim]

i dont have the money for a vBulliten. ive said that multiple times in this thread. im going upgrade to ipboard when i can afford it

 

[Mr Ex]

The options i like about smf is you can set some parts of the forum as paid subscription. also the interface is much more cleaner than phpbb and easier to install mods. I don't know if you can do this in phpbb, but in smf you can pretty much do the same junior vip, donor, hidden forum stuff like bhw has. And it's free. I used the latest version for a bit and haven't found any vulnerabilities about exposed emails.

But if you have the money, definitely go with vbulletin, or postpone your project and start when you have the funds. Because changing forum type with lots of posts and members may be a real pain in the ass.