I am getting ready to open a new site. It’s been one I have been wanting to open for a while and is in a niche that is rather new. There are some established sites in the niche so the sledding will not be easy, but, since this is a somewhat newer niche there is a good chance of being successful. For this site I will use IPB. I still think IPB is the best forum software to date.

I recently resigned my admin position from a popular admin community that will remain nameless in this post. The reason for that will be clear in the end. Since that time many things have been bothering me about these communities with the exception of one. They refuse to join in any sort of alliance with each other that could and more than likely would benefit them all. Instead each has there own variation of the rule that you can not link to other admin forums.

Once upon a time in a land far away I owned the most popular visual basic programming forum. I sold that forum along with a start up Visual Studio programming forum. Since that time I went on to other ventures. 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 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.

I needed to upgrade PHP on my servers. I run a mix of Windows 2008 and Windows 2003 servers using IIS. I had been doing quit a bit of research the last couple weeks. My research taught me a few things. PHP for Windows has evolved to the point that it can run as well on Windows as it does on Linux servers without the errors we used to see. I’m not going to get into them since anyone that has been running Windows Servers with PHP for any length of time will be able to tell you about the …Read more »