vBulletin: A Users Guide: Configure, manage and maintain your own vBulletin discussion forum

But why have a discussion board? Well one good reason is that there is a tendency for a website to seem like a one-sided conversation with the webmaster talking to the visitors, but by adding a discussion area the webmaster can bring the benefits of two-way discussion to the website and in doing so create a community.

By spending the time, effort, and money needed to give this foundation to a community, the webmaster can make visitors to the website feel that they are part of something bigger. As a consequence they will visit the site more often, spending more time there, promoting it by word of mouth, and sharing links on their own websites, blog entries, and signature lines on other forums. Online communities take on a life of their own, and they can bring a whole new level of life and energy to an otherwise static, slowly evolving website.

All of this means the website has an advantage over similar sites that don't have a discussion area.

Let's be clear from the start—vBulletin does far more than build a discussion area. vBulletin is a complete solution to the community needs of website owners. It's a commercial product (as opposed to a free product), which perhaps rules it out for the smaller, more low-key websites. (Although if they have an eye to future growth, then they might do well in choosing a product that will grow with them right from the start.)

Another big feature of vBulletin is that because of its popularity there are a huge number of add‑ons and modifications available, some commercial but many available free. This means that you need not be stuck with a discussion board that looks, feels, and behaves like all the other discussion boards on the Web.

vBulletin has been a success story right from the start.

The vBulletin discussion board software was developed and marketed by Jelsoft Ltd., a UK-based new media company specializing in developing low-cost, high-performance web applications. Jelsoft has over six years experience in the online communities business and has been working with community-driven websites since the birth of the Internet as we know it today.

vBulletin is its flagship product—it is a product that has been designed with speed, security, and flexibility in mind. Jelsoft's goal with vBulletin was to create a product that would both give the site administrators the tools that they need to get the job done, and give the end user effective communication and an enjoyable experience. The end users have a variety of tools at their disposal that allow them to communicate effectively with others, while administrators and moderators have powerful tools that allow them to move, edit, or delete posts, threads, and users, as well as a powerful control panel to control the look, feel, and function of the discussion board.

In over six years of development a lot has changed in vBulletin, but at the same time a lot has stayed the same—speed, flexibility, and security have always been at the core of vBulletin.

vBulletin was originally developed and built to power the VB-World.net community forums, which were some of the world's largest and busiest communities of Microsoft Visual Basic programmers. At the time many products were tested, but none could be scaled up to meet the demands of these communities, so vBulletin had an instant niche. vBulletin has now attracted a large and diverse list of clients from small, special interest sites to big, broad discussion groups.

Another feature important to the vBulletin developers is stability and performance under load. Jelsoft is proud to have been able to test vBulletin under huge loads with over 1000 users taking part in discussions on the board at once. With vBulletin the site owner doesn't need worry about too many posts slowing the board down, as vBulletin has been tested and proved to run smoothly with over 30 million posts held in the database.

vBulletin is designed to be versatile and can be run on a variety of platforms.

No matter whether you site is big or small, you don't want to be waiting around for things to happen. vBulletin is designed with speed in mind, so you and your users, whether on a dial-up modem or a broadband connection, won't be stuck waiting for pages to load.

vBulletin offers:

vBulletin is easy and fast to customize. Thanks to a variety of in-built tools the interface can be changed with the minimum knowledge of web programming languages.

vBulletin offers:

Even the most stable discussion board needs maintenance every so often to keep it running properly. Also, since it is the data stored in the discussion board that forms the backbone of the community, data backup and restoration is vital.

Features offered by vBulletin include:

vBulletin offers a whole host of other features for both the end users and the forum administrators and moderators. Over the course of the book we will be looking at a number of them.

Here are some of the best and most compelling features:

For more information about vBulletin and for purchasing information visit the official vBulletin website at http://www.vbulletin.com.

Purchasing a leased license will allow you to run vBulletin on your server for one year. During this period you will be entitled to technical support and software upgrades.

After this period you will either need to purchase another license or discontinue using the software.

Currently a leased license cost $85 a year. At the end of the lease period you can either renew the lease for another year or purchase an owned license.

Purchasing an owned license will allow you to run a copy of vBulletin on your server for an unlimited amount of time and allows access to all updates released for one year. After the year you can purchase a renewal of this access.

Currently an owned license costs $160, with yearly support and new version download access costing $30 for subsequent years.

Choose carefully between the two—making the wrong choice can end up costing you money in the long run.

If you want a short-term forum or you want to try vBulletin out for size, then a leased license is the way to go. However, three years of running vBulletin at leased license prices costs more than an owned license with yearly support and upgrade options would have cost you (and you still won't own the software).

For further information about vBulletin pricing or to purchase, visit http://www.vbulletin.com/order.