SmartGWT Forum

[edulid]

Hi,

please excuse me if this is a little off topic, but I was not able to find the right forum-thread for this.

We are trying to install a new forum on our website, and I like the SmartGWT forum a lot, so I wanted to ask if the software you use for this is open-source or what software exactly do you use in your forums? I would appreciate if you could give me some information on this.

Regards,
Eduardo

[Isomorphic]

This gave the Support team a bit of a chuckle because honestly, we hate the forums software.

This is VBulletin, which has a PHP backend and is commercially licensed, but inexpensive. You get the source code and you can modify it.. which is a mixed blessing, to say the least.

Implementing single sign-on with our other sites was a matter of diving into the source code and replicating their database access code in other languages. No attempt was made at making it configurable, and the code is crap.

Also, we turned off tons of features we didn't want. There is a control panel to do so, but turning something off in the control panel doesn't really disable the feature as you would expect, it just breaks the feature. There are still dangling links to the disabled feature throughout the product, but now those links don't work. So you have to directly edit the source code to get rid of the broken links.

Every now and then we have to update to a new version to get security fixes when the code has drifted too far for us to patch incrementally, then we have to redo all the source code changes to actually turn features off.

We could tell several more horror stories. Basically, it's awful. Switching to some other system is a task that has been festering for some time.

Now that we've helped you dodge a bullet, if you find other forums software with which you can roughly replicate this forum, it would be great if you can tell us about it, especially if it features migration from VBulletin!