Microsoft .Net Programmers Forum

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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.

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Forum SEO: vBulletin/vbSEO vs IPB with SEO URL’S

Posted on by AWS26 Comments on Forum SEO: vBulletin/vbSEO vs IPB with SEO URL’S

Brandon Sheley posted this on Twitter.

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.

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How to Increase PHP Performance on Windows Servers

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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 errors that were common.

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.

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Howto: Converting from vBulletin to IP.Board

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I am getting ready to convert Computer Help Forums from vBulletin to IPB. This is in a way a more complex change because the users use the album feature extensively. We also have a downloads section so those will have to moved over to IP.Downloads.

I am starting this to document the steps I take so it can serve as a tutorial for others that are going to switch from vBulletin to IPB. The vBulletin version running is 3.8.4. The version of IPB that will be installed will be 3.0.5. I will also install IP.Downloads, IP.Gallery, IP.Blog and IP.Content.

Watch this post to follow the progress of this vBulletin to IPB conversion. Each step and procedure as well as post conversion configuration will be outlined so that anyone that  wants to convert from vBulletin to IPB will have a set of procedures to follow.

Read on to see the steps I took to convert Computer Help Forums from vbulletin to IPB.

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