vBulletin - the good, the bad, and the ugly

I’m in the process of setting up an internal vBulletin-based board at my work. I am coming up to speed with the toolset and my first impression is that it seems really powerful and highly configurable. I’m trying to work out what the optimum settings would be for our site, which we intend to use for IT-related discussions.

Personally I like the “straightforwardness” of the Straight Dope site as I find avatars et al distracting from the exchange of information and ideas. I also like the (generally) responsible behaviour of the posters and would be interested in what tools and techniques help encourage this.

By way of comparison, here’s another board I sometimes visit. It uses some other features such as polling and rating of threads/users which look interesting but the overall feel is a bit too busy for my tastes.

I’d be interested in hearing from mods/admins here, admins on other boards, and from “normal” users about what you like about this site and what you have seen elsewhere that you like.

/ La bamba

In the year two thousaaaaaaaaannnnddd.

La bomba/

:confused: Not sure I understand that one, bob.

I’m not sure if our example is a good one to follow, but it’s worked for us, more or less. It’s been an evolving relationship over time, with decisions, procedures, and policy growing out of the community’s interactions with fellow posters and management.

We started out giving our users a lot more things to play with; originally we allowed the uploading of image files, html, that sort of thing. We didn’t consider avatars at the beginning, but I’m not sure was an available option in early versions. (It’s been a long time, a lot of blood under the bridge.)

Later we decided against avatars and “flying baloney” not only for esthetic qualities, but because just getting posts read and written takes up all our server capacity and we can’t spare anything for extras. This is also why we don’t use the calendar or public messaging or the polling features built in as well; we really concentrate on the core functions.

Over the passage of time, we had to remove most of the options from use because of continued abuse by a few users. We’ve had a lot of that sort of thing, where the actions of a small minority adversely affected the entire membership, but when a situation that takes hours of your time to correct can be totally eliminated in a keystroke, you see why that becomes your best solution.

We also decided pretty early not to allow users to edit their posts, not even for correction of typos. This can be a very disputational board even under the best of circumstances and it’s just better for us to not offer this to our users; again, the possibility of abuse is just too tempting. YMMV, however.

For security reasons, we don’t allow the display of who’s online.

And some of our functions, such as search, are only available to subscribing members. This is not only an incentive to subscribe, but also to further limit accessibilty to member information by spammers and the like.

You must also be totally clear in your purpose; while we do allow quite a bit of flexibility in some forum areas, there’s others where the focus of that particular area is more finely drawn and we tend to enforce with more presence in those areas to hew closer to the forum descriptions as outlined. We still think that gives everyone a lot of choices. Because each area does tend to be so different, there’s little differences in forum rules as well; the breezy, let-it-all-hang-out-your-mama-is sensibility of the Pit, for instance, is a sharp contrast to General Questions. MPSIMS (Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share, which is often not any of the previous) is more casual than Great Debates, as the names should tell you.

If you have other questions, I would recommend that you write us personally, I think this is better served taken off the board. My email address is TubaDiva@aol.com.

Good luck with your new board.

your humble TubaDiva

What options work well will depend on your userbase. I was initially against allowing colored text, since on other Internet venues I’ve seen, users have a tendancy to post in rainbow colors, or all yellow, or the like. Indeed, many places on the Internet, that sort of nonsense is welcomed and appreciated. But it turns out that most folks here are eminently sensible about that sort of thing, so we can allow color and get the benefits of occasional use, without the annoyance of frivolous use. On your board, that may be different. Likewise for font tags, size control, smilieys and other images, and other features.

As a moderator, my tool kit includes a two-by-four, a taser, and industrial strength Advil. And those are just for dealing with the normal posters! :smiley:

But that’s not so bad, Sam. You know, of course, you need all that stuff and a quart of scotch to deal with the staff.

And why the hell does your “title” say “Charter Member?”

I don’t know where else to ask. Forgive my idiocy, but:

What are those little colored circles next to our names supposed to mean? Mine is green, others have grey, etc. What gives?

Green= you’re online. And I know this. And I can see what you’re wearing…

Well, I was kidding about your atire. :slight_smile:

Ahhh! Many thanks!

(I DO exist! YAY!)

Our two newest moderators were Charter Members before they became moderators. When Jerry made the global sort, they were on the subscription list and so popped up as “Charter Members.” They’re back to being moderators and they never lost their superpowers. (User titles aren’t kryptonite.)

I’ll be double-checking the SDSAB list as well; any of you SDSAB-ers who read this, you don’t need to resubscribe. (For those who wonder what SDSAB means, that’s the folks from the Straight Dope Science and Advisory Board; see the staff reports.)

your humble TubaDiva
Writing to you from the gazebo at the Fortress of Solitude

All right, what’s the little red/not red square up beside the date and time for?

Post read/unread.

your humble TubaDiva

Thanks for the info, everyone (And TubaDiva in particular).

Our board will be internal to my organisation so I’m hoping that intelligent discourse will be a given, and we won’t have to worry about spammers.

I’m generally against the “flying baloney” for all of the reasons you describe. That said, in order to build up critical mass I am inclined to allow some of the extra features to help generate interest. And it may be useful to allow people to attach code snippets, for example.

I think the main challenges are going to be setting up the forums correctly and identifying mods who will take the time to guide the discussion, proactively engage people, and drive traffic to the site.

If I have any more specific questions I’ll follow up by email.

Flying Baloney

That there would be a fun little band name.

Strange…someone with 4000+ posts doesn’t know how to “hover”? When you move the cursor over something like the little colored circles and pause for a sec, doesn’t a balloon pop up and give you a hint? If so, that’s a great way to learn what’s what. If not, maybe you need a different browser?

To be honest, it never occurred to me to hover over it, or click on it, even. I need an extra dopesmack today.

Smashie me.

I would if I could, but Mr. Smashie is but a distant memory of bygone days. How about a plain ol’ smilie instead? :slight_smile:

Well, that’s much kinder than the fabled smashie, so I guess I should take it! :wink:

All the same, smashie sure sounds like he was a fun guy to have around. Maybe just one teensy-weensy little animated smilie wouldn’t bring the server to its knees?