The sites enabled so far are:

Android Phone Forum
Windows 8 forum
Windows Server 2008 Forum
Mac Mini Forum
Forum SEO Help
Microsoft Visual Studio .Net Programming Forum
Just BS Chat Forum
Computer Help Forums

I will be adding this site and the last 2 forums soon.

What I have found so far. vBulletin is a far inferior product. There is just so much wrong with it compared to IPB I don’t know where to start.

First lets look at the style editor and the vbulletin stylevars. The vbulletin style editor is old, very old in fact. When you edit a template the complete page refreshes and you are brought back to the template editor main page. If you make a mistake and the site doesn’t render correctly you have to find your spot to correct the problem. Not any easy task.

Now lets look at IPB template editor. You want to change the width of the site you open the main css file in the editor. Find the place to change, change it and commit the change. Notice how you get an ajax refresh and you stayed on the exact area of the edit. So when you check the site in a new windows if it doesn’t look right you can easily and quickly undo the edit.

Win for IPB.

Now lets look at SEO. Both vbulletin and IPB have SE friendly url’s. The vbulletin url’s take more to get working correctly and do not 301 same content. IPB url’s 301 exact content so you won’t be penalized for duplicate content. Unless you use vbseo vbulletin can not compare with IPB out of the box as far as SEO goes.

Without vbseo win for IPB.
With vbseo win for vBulletin.

There are other things that make IPB hands down the winner over vbulletin and it would take me a long time to point them out. Let me just say that I gave vbulletin another chance and after 2 years of development for the 4.0 branch it is still going backwards. In the same time IPB has set the bar extremely high by improving at every turn.

Now I have to convert the new site to IPB and this is the last time I will speak on vbulletin unless they absolutely blow my socks off in the future which is highly unlikely.

The only content in the last few years have been user submitted tutorials and news articles when new .Net components or controls are released. I myself haven’t added any code for over 6 years. As I said the code archive is old and dated.

If someone wants the site database and all the source code I will zip it all up and give it to you. If there are no takers I will just upload it to this site and let anyone that wants it have it. If it does get put up for download I will remove all the user data so if you’re a spammer and reading this don’t expect to get any email address.

There is plenty of content in the articles and some of the source code could still be useful as a learning tool. The site itself gets 3 or 4 new articles that get approved every couple weeks. Traffic to the site is steady although not as many people visit like they did in it’s heyday.

While I am going to give all the content and database away I am selling the domain. The site has a tremendous amount of back links on some of the most reputable programming sites. It is also in the Yahoo directory and at one time was designated as the best programming site in it’s category. It also listed in Dmoz.  Since the domain is old and established it has built up respect in the programming community. It is the oldest still active visual basic programming site. All of the competitors from it’s heyday are either gone or no longer active.

If you are interested in buying the domain or want the content for free drop me an email. As far as price goes for the domain I will have it appraised and sell it for a reasonable price below top value.

xenForo would not run. 500 errors for everything I did. I tried to upgrade it to xenForo RC 1 and while the installer recognized the xenForo database it didn’t give an option to upgrade. I could only do a clean install.

Since this was my personal playground I just blew it all up and started fresh. The first install didn’t work. It wouldn’t even start and there were no errors in the php log or the app pool logs. I turned on tracing for the site and while it told me the reason was a 500 error in the installer script it didn’t tell me which function. I could have tweaked the tracer config a bit to give me more info, but, since this was a test bed I shutoff tracing, download a new zip from xenForo and proceeded with the install.

The original zip I had must have been corrupt becuase the second attempt at the install worked without a hitch. I did try another upgrade on the original database and it was still a no go.

I imagine the problem is because of the differences in the 2 servers config. The old server was Windows 2003 32bit with 32bit mysql. The new server is Windows 2008R2 running 64bit php and mysql. Could be xenForo didn’t like the difference.

Anyway the install worked and my xenForo test bed is now open to all at http://test.spamforo.com.

I have posted a few threads of things I like and dislike about xenForo on the site including a detailed review. So not to repeat myself here just head over to the xenForo test site.

There was some forums and posts in the database that had to cleaned. I lost a couple hundred posts doing this so it wasn’t bad. I deleted all the subscriber forums which were the ones with the bad posts. The post contained warez and porn. While this is and will remian a general forum warez and porn is a no go for me.

The steps I took to get the site up and running took some time. There were hacks installed that caused 500 errors. I added back the hacks that caused the most problems. Once I was able to get the forum loaded I registered a new account. Then I used the tools.php to give that new account admin access. Once I did that I took over the main admin account and demoted all the old staff. Not to say I won’t bring them back. It’s just I don’t know them yet. Hopefully they will come back and once again become staff members.

Then I cleaned all the bad posts and reshuffled the forums. It was late so I called it a night.

This morning I finished the cleanup and optimization, added a default skin and came here to post this announcement. There are still some things to be done. I want to add a gallery, vbgallery since I have 2 unused licenses, an arcade and install vbexpierence again since it was part of the old site.

Without further ado I give you vBnt – General Forums.

The ste

I am in the process of buying a database from a site that closed a couple months ago. It is a vbulletin 3.8.6 database. I am leaning towards using vbulletin 4.1.1 for this site. I haven’t touched vbulletin in almost 6 months. The reason I am considering vbulletin on this site is to see how far the software has come. Judging by the comments and threads about 4.1.1 on the vbulletin forums it seems as if it is going in the right direction. Yes there are some negative replies, but, if you really look at those comments you’ll see it’s from the same group of disgruntled people. The users that left for another forum product that for whatever reason still hang out at vbulletin to make everyone uncomfortable.

I am willing to give anyone a second chance and this is vbulletins second chance. I have 3 unused licenses that I never sold with the rest I had so nothing is lost if it turns out that vbulletin isn’t really getting any better. If vbulletin 4 doesn’t work out I can convert to IPB down the road.

Even though I will be using it on a new site it doesn’t mean I will ever spend any more money on more licenses. That will never happen. If I buy any forum licenses for future projects you can be sure the money will be spent for IPB and not vbulletin.

Internet Brands. This is your second and final chance. You’ll never see any more of my money, but, you could get good PR from me, Lord knows you need it, if you keep me interested and keep vbulletin up the standards it used to follow.

One community, the one I resigned from takes this to the ridiculous. Not only can’t you link to any other admin community. You can’t mention the name of the admin forum and in most cases the admin forum name is replaced by “another forum”. There are also rules at this not to be named admin forum that disallows staff to have any sort of like community. If you do have a webmaster community you are prohibited from having a link directory that will include links to other admin forums or have any forum that is geared to forum admins. This was in the thread in which I resigned. This is ridiculous. There are other reasons I resigned and the no link policy as well as the owners short sightedness when it comes to bringing the forum into the present are the two that broke the camels back for me. This nameless admin community is still languished in 2003 and the owner is too short sighted to do anything about it. His reasons? He would lose his designer and programmer. Then why do you own a community if you can’t do these things yourself or at the very least can’t find someone familiar with the new improved software do them for you?

I for one am glad this admin community is not going to move into the new era. All the rest of the admin forums are in the same boat with the exception of one. They are all vbulletin centric with little to no discussions taking place about other software. They are basically all covering the same topics about the same software. This is also the main reason why these forums have these nonsense no compete rules. This puts off users of other software. Just take a look at Admin Addict, Admin Fusion and the nameless forum to name a few, I’ll let you figure out the URL to the nameless forum for yourself, and you’ll see much the same thing with a different wrapper.

The admin forum scene was so bad that I had considered starting one myself. Instead I kept my eye on a new one, Admin Extra. While they started out on vbulletin and had the same familiar faces signed up I got a sense that the owner knew where she wanted to take the site and knew outdated software wasn’t going to get it there. Admin Extra made the leap to 2010 in one fell swoop. In doing so Admin Extra is already starting to jump ahead of the other admin forums. Already you’re seeing people show up that use other software. Sure the same familiar vbulletin people are there, but, there is a nice flow of new faces bringing new perspective to the admin forum world.

While the forum to remain nameless and the rest of the admin community world languish in the past with outdated software and enforce archaic to the point of idiotic rules for staff Admin Extra has forged ahead and I predict that within the next year will be the defacto leader in the admin forum field leaving the nameless admin forum and the rest in the dust.

If I owned an admin forum I would be worried right about now. Your days are numbered. Admin Extra saw the future and grabbed a hold of it and as a result is heading to the top. All the others will be yesterdays news, if they aren’t already, in a short time.

I always had it the back of my mind to open another programming forum.

Most of my sites are tech sites with the exception of a couple off topic forums. I just never could find the time needed to dedicate myself to nurturing a new programming community. You really need to be able answer the questions in the early stages and since I haven’t daddled in any code other than C and PHP over the last few years I didn’t want to undertake something I had not messed with since Visual Studio 2003 and since I sold the .Net forum.

I started to think more seriously about creating the new Microsoft .Net Forums after I remembered that I created the original .Net forum to not only replace the Visual Basic forum, Visual Basic was nearing end of life, but, also to learn .Net. First I decided to make the forum a part of Extreme VB and .Net which I transitioned to .Net a couple years back. I created the forum and the structure as a subdomain of Extreme VB and .Net.

I then went about consolidating some of my communities to streamline my network and had more or less forgot about the new forum. I closed it down because during my absence spammers had their way with it. I also didn’t like the fact that it was on a subdomain and not on it’s own. I had my eye on a couple domains and when the one that was my first choice became I available I bought it as soon as it appeared in my available list.

I used my last remaining vBulletin license and opened up the community. I did have an extra IPB license and I was going to use it, but, I have another community that is ready for conversion and it was already dedicated for it. Microsoft .Net Programming Forums will eventually be converted to IPB.

Without further ado I’d like to introduce everyone to Microsoft .Net Forums a community for .Net programmers to gather and share ideas and solve each others .Net programming problems. We can all learn together at Microsoft .Net Forums.

I’m 95% certain I can get a vb+vbseo board to out rank an IPB forum with the same content & links.

I was going to write an article about this very topic. I had gathered the data and taken screenshots to do this and until Brandon posted on Twitter I didn’t have the urge. I have converted 3 of my communities to IPB from vBulletin. The sites all had vbSEO installed. I gathered the data from  Computer Help Forums from the last week I had vBulletin with vbSEO installed and then each week after the conversion to IPB. What I did was look at stats for each week after after I converted. Initially pageviews dropped, but, site visits and visitors stayed constant. Then about 2 weeks  in I noticed an increase in pageviews, visits and visitors. I also noticed that the search engines seemed to visit more often.

First a little information about the before and after. I had vBuletin installed with vbSEO. I used the vbSEO replacement feature which adds the first x words from each post to the header. I used the custom meta tags for each page and keyword thread titles.

When I converted to IPB I set up htaccess friendly url’s. I redirected the old vbSEO url’s to the default vBulletin url’s. Then used the tools IPB gives you to redirect the old url’s to the new IPB search engine friendly url’s. I have done nothing extra to the stock install of IPB to make it more SE friendly. The site doesn’t even have meta tags. I don’t know if adding them would help, but, it sure hasn’t hurt as the stats below will tell you.

Take a look at the last week I had vBulletin installed with vbSEO.

Now look at the stats from the site 2 weeks after converting to IPB.

IPB one week stats

As you can see since the switch from vBulletin with vbSEO to IPB with no extra SEO being done the site gets more traffic, more visitors and more pageviews.

Now lets look at the SE activity on the site. One would expect this to increase anyway since the search engines had to re-index all the content. That is why I went a little farther ahead with this data. I wanted to let things calm down and in order to do that I waited until a month passed.

Search engine activity from the last week vBulletin and vbSEO were installed.

Now lets look at the first week a month after the install of IPB.

As you can see the search engines seem to like the site. They visit with more frequency.

Clearly a stock install of IPB with no special SEO done to it will not hurt your site in the search engines. In fact in my case the results with a stock IPB install performed better than the install of vBulletin with vbSEO.

So getting back to Brandon’s tweet. I would bet that anything that he can do with vbSEO wouldn’t matter at all. An equal IPB forum with same content would perform as well or better. That’s my opinion anyway.

Now on to the steps I took to increase the performance of my PHP websites running on Windows 2008 and Windows 2003 with IIS. At the end of the article I’ll supply links to the downloads I used.

My previous configuration had PHP 5.2.3 running in ISAPI mode with thread safe binaries. There were no options for non-thread safe binaries at the time. I think they first became available with 5.3.0 and in later versions of the 5.2 branch. With 5.3.0 the ISAPI extension is deprecated so you have no choice but to use CGI. CGI by itself is much slower than ISAPI and there are no accelerators such as xcache that will work it. I’m not going to get into the difference between thread safe and non-thread safe in PHP. Instead I’ll direct to a blog post on IIS.net which give you a brief description of the 2. View it here.

On my Windows 2003 servers I upgraded PHP to 5.2.12 non thread safe. I changed all the sites so that they used the CGI binary. There is no ISAPI filter for IIS in the NTS downloads. After I had PHP configured with the extensions I needed to be loaded, you’ll need the NTS extensions since thread safe extensions will not work, I turned IIS back online and recycled the app pools for each site. As expected the site was slower with this configuration and loads on the server increased.

The next step was to download the FastCGI wrapper. I downloaded it and installed it on the server. I then set up the fast cgi ini to use the PHP cgi binary and set the basic configuration. Once that was done I set each site to use the fast cgi binary to serve pages. I then recycled the app pools again. I checked the site again and the speed of each site was better than it had ever been with ISAPI and xcache. The load on the server was also lower than it had ever been. After the site ran all night I noticed I was getting some timeouts on certain scripts. I was able to correct that by tweaking the fast cgi ini. For one I had to make sure the timeout for script execution was the same as it is in php.ini. I also added a few other changes that seem to have increased performance even more that the default install.

My final fast cgi ini looks like this:

[Types]
php=PHP

[PHP]
ExePath=C:\Inetpub\php-5.2.12-nts\php-cgi.exe
InstanceMaxRequests=10000
EnvironmentVars=PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS:10000
MaxInstances=300
IdleTimeout=300
ActivityTimeout=300
RequestTimeout=300
QueueLength=2000

The only downside to using fast cgi is none of the opcode caches like xcache work with it. While fast cgi by itself gave the server a serious speed improvement over ISAPI I had got used to having xcache installed. I then found a post about an opcode cache built specifiably for Windows Server running fast cgi. It’s called wincache. I downloaded it and installed it. To my surprise page load times decreased again and server load was next to nothing.

For Windows 2003 servers you can’t go wrong with NTS binaries with fast cgi and wincache.

Now that I had my Windows 2003 servers done I went on to the Windows 2008 Servers. This was much easier since the fast cgi wrapper is already the way you run php on Windows 2008. I had been running thread safe versions of PHP so when I upgraded PHP I went to 5.3.1 NTS using the vc9 build. I noticed a slight speed increase. Not as much as I did on the Windows 2003 servers, but, an increase none the less.

I then installed wincache. After 24 hours I now see a marked performance increase on the Windows 2008 servers.

So if you want to give your Windows Servers a shot in the arm switch to PHP non thread safe with fast cgi and wincache. You’ll be glad you did.

Here are the links to the downloads you’ll need.

Fast CGI wrapper for IIS 6
wincache download page