UW Students Forum is online

[sjeddie]

Hi all, I've created a UW Students Forum to start building a general channel of communication, and in turn a stronger student community. Check if out! It's at uwforum.ca

It's really new (I launched last night). It's immediately useful as a UW Craigslist to buy and sell stuff and share rides. It's also pretty good for asking questions, whether you're a perspective student or already in the university. In the future I'm hoping to give free forums to clubs, so we can pool all the members together.

I've been on compsci.ca when I was in high school... but forgot my username! It was very helpful to me. I hope to give the same kind of assistance back in a different way.

So if you're at UW, or thinking of going to UW, hope to see you on board! uwforum.ca

[ProgrammingFun]

I see that you're using Vanilla for the forum. So you plan on monthly payments for the forum? Why didn't you just go with a free alternative?

[sjeddie]

That's right, I'm planning on paying monthly for the forum. This is mainly so I can offload maintenance and technical details of keeping the forum up to the Vanilla team. As for why Vanilla, it was because things like Facebook login and addons are a no brainer. For this convenience, time saved, and peace of mind of a proven architecture, I believe it's worth the time - and I can allocate the saved time on tackling the non-technical problem of building a community.

[mirhagk]

I joined the community. Out of curiosity how much do you pay a month?

[ProgrammingFun]

sjeddie @ Thu Jan 05, 2012 12:49 pm wrote:

That's right, I'm planning on paying monthly for the forum. This is mainly so I can offload maintenance and technical details of keeping the forum up to the Vanilla team. As for why Vanilla, it was because things like Facebook login and addons are a no brainer. For this convenience, time saved, and peace of mind of a proven architecture, I believe it's worth the time - and I can allocate the saved time on tackling the non-technical problem of building a community.

If you want Facebook and Twitter integration, try InvisionPowerBoard, it's a one time payment and it has a much larger user-base than Vanilla...
...and if you want, I can help you in taking care of the technicalities while you focus on the community

(You could also look into XenForo, which costs about the same as IPB, but is newer and is getting a lot of attention recently EDIT: I would recommend IPB more because it allows for registration using more services while XenForo only provides Twitter).

[Sur_real]

mirhagk @ Thu Jan 05, 2012 12:51 pm wrote:

I joined the community. Out of curiosity how much do you pay a month?

I'm guessing 49 a month? no point in getting any of the higher plans right now I think...
http://vanillaforums.com/plans

[ProgrammingFun]

I meant Facebook in my last post, last word

[sjeddie]

Yep, $49 USD a month. Works out to about $55 CAD with taxes and stuff.

Man, Invision Power Board does look really good! Its hosted plan is cheaper as well (at least for the community's size so far). But ProgrammingFun, other than price, what do you think are some advantages it has over Vanilla? And haha I'd love to have some help with this

Thanks for joining guys!! I have a master plan of giving clubs free sub forums, so we can pool all their members together and reach critical mass. I'm planning to go around club fair next week but if you know any clubs that would be interested please let me know!

Edit: also, the other really important feature IMO is to be able to subscribe to threads. So you get a notification when there's a response. Preferably the subscription is implied when you get involved in the topic, much like how Facebook does it.

[ProgrammingFun]

sjeddie @ Thu Jan 05, 2012 2:59 pm wrote:

Man, Invision Power Board does look really good! Its hosted plan is cheaper as well (at least for the community's size so far). But ProgrammingFun, other than price, what do you think are some advantages it has over Vanilla? And haha I'd love to have some help with this

I would personally recommend that you just buy the software and host it yourself because this would give you MUCH more control, won't penalize you for more members, and will be cheaper in the long run. It will however, require a significant investment, though that investment would cancel out after 3 months (in Vanilla).

As for features over Vanilla, I already mentioned the huge amount of control of self-hosting, so here is a list of things that Vanilla doesn't have:

Flat and threaded discussions, Vanilla only has flat
Can be distributed via major App stores
Trashcan forum, though you shouldn't need this
Topic tags, dedicated topics icons, hidden topics
Rich text editor and formatting buttons
Polling, calendar, member list
Portal feature, CMS, Picture Album and download manager
Many more custom themes and plugins
Limiting new users' rights until they prove themselves to be worthy (prevents spambots)

BTW, I'm not trying to sell you IPB or anything, just trying to save you money. If you didn't want facebook integration, then phpBB is free (running on this forum)
The list I gave above was from reading the feature lists of both along with personal experience

[Tony]

phpBB is an absolute mess. Unless you plan on changing the source code beyond installing plugins, a hosted solution could be very nice, as it takes care of a lot of problems for you.

We pay about that much for the server anyway, so "free self-hosted solution" is not necessarily cheaper.

[sjeddie]

I actually made an initial version of uwforum.ca with phpbb before, self hosted on a vps. Maybe I didn't do it right but I had to manually install plugins (like copying files around, editing source) when the instructions is obviously a well formatted xml file. The vps was about $20 a month.

I'll definitely check out IPB though, make a test forum with it or something. It looks neat.

Thanks Tony, good to know!

Btw, any of you going to SDN meetup tonight?

[ProgrammingFun]

sjeddie @ Thu Jan 05, 2012 4:20 pm wrote:

I actually made an initial version of uwforum.ca with phpbb before, self hosted on a vps. Maybe I didn't do it right but I had to manually install plugins (like copying files around, editing source) when the instructions is obviously a well formatted xml file. The vps was about $20 a month.

phpBB plugins can usually be auto-installed via AutoMOD...I think that VPS + IPB would be a great solution

Tony wrote:

phpBB is an absolute mess. Unless you plan on changing the source code beyond installing plugins, a hosted solution could be very nice, as it takes care of a lot of problems for you.

Meh, I've used it for a couple of sites and it was enough for what they required. It does require a significant amount of time to get everything working properly though.
I've also heard a lot of praise for FluxBB but it's community is pretty small.

[Tony]

ProgrammingFun @ Thu Jan 05, 2012 4:26 pm wrote:

it was enough for what they required

I was thinking more in terms of the code quality than the feature set.

[ProgrammingFun]

Tony @ Thu Jan 05, 2012 4:47 pm wrote:

I was thinking more in terms of the code quality than the feature set.

Yeah I know, I was referring to the fact that they didn't know that and phpBB had enough plugins for all of the needed features.

[Ronald Weasley]

Just Joined!! Hope it becomes popular for all the waterloo students