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.

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.

To stop the post spam I use reCaptcha.  It seems to be the most effective against spambots, but, for the low life spammers that still do things manually even reCaptcha doesn’t help. The main purpose of these spammers is to get backlinks to their sites and services. What I did was create a new usergroup called Registered Members. The new group has the same privileges as the default Registered Users group.

Read on to see how to set up the registered users group and the new registered members group permissions to help combat vBulletin forum spam.

First thing we do is edit the registered users group. Disallow usage of the link bbcode. If a spambot or a low life spammer that is doing things manually registers the first thing they will do is post some spam. When they try add a link to a post they will get the no permission error. This stops them in their tracks. This is not completely fool proof. If they check the option to not automatically parse links the spam links will be posted they just will not be linked. Akismet will even let the post in since no links are actually posted.

Some of these spammers know it isn’t as easy as it used to be to post spam in threads so they have come up with a new type of spam. Private message spam. A spammer signs in and the first thing they do is head to the control panel and proceed to PM every user except for admins and moderators. I’m not sure this is automated since the bot would have to know who is an admin or mod. Either way it is the most annoying type of forum spam and has caused many forum owners and users pain. This is very easy to stop.

Open the usergroup page and edit the registered users usergroup again. In the private message settings use these settings.

1. Maximum Stored Messages:  0
2. Maximum Recipients to Send PMs at a time: 1

Those settings disallow sending private messages for Registered Users.

Now we don’t want to disallow PM’s for everyone except mods and admins so we create a new uer group called Registered Members. Create that group and give the group the default permissions that an unedited Registered User would have. Turn on bbcode and setup private messages. For private messages I use this.

1. Maximum Stored Messages:  10
2. Maximum Recipients to Send PMs at a time: 2
3. Message Throttle Quantity: 2

This will allow the new group to have a max of 10 PM’s stored in their PM folders. Will allow them to send 2 PM’s at a time and will not let them send another 2 until the time limit set in options is expired. You can set it up any way you want. After all if the users meets the requirements to be promoted to this group they aren’t there to spam.

Save your changes. You’ll need a way to move users to ths new group without doing it manually. This is where the vBulletin promotion manager comes in to play.

In the usergroup menu in the left frame click the promotions link. Select add new promotion. Set up the promotion like this.

1. Reputation Level: 0
2. Days Registered: 30 or more if you choose
3. Posts: 3 or any number you choose
4. Promotion Type: Primary User Group
5. Promotion Strategy: Posts
6. Reputation Comparison Type: Greater or Equal to
7. Move User to Usergroup: Select the Registered Members group

After a user has 3 posts they will be promoted to the new Registered Members group with full posting and PM permissions. This will stop 90% of all post and PM spam.

Why is this effective? A drive by spammer is only interested in one thing. To post links to to their wares. They use a bot to register or do it maunually. Once they register their only goal is to post spam. This will not allow them to do this. They will try and fail. When they fail they move on to another forum. Sure you’ll have a user that will never be seen again, but, your community will be spam free. It’s munch easier to prune users then to contantly clean out spam posts.

If you have any question or think this post was helpful post a comment. No need to regisiter to comment. I use a very effective anti-spam measure on this site.