Some Ideas I Had - Feedback Needed

Written by Jeffro On August 14, 2007 | Category Of Post (News) | 584 views |

I just wanted to pass along some ideas I had concerning this site. Your feedback to these ideas or perhaps some of your own would be highly appreciated. The first idea is, creating a live chat area where visitors of this site can get together to chat about the various topics this site covers.

The chat room could be available 24/7 or I could schedule chats which would occur at a specific date and time. I was going to give this a try tonight using Meebo, but I experienced an enormous amount of problems.

The second idea is attaching a forum to the site. The forum would contain sections that would cover the various topics covered on this site. It would open up yet another, community avenue for this site where like minded individuals can get together and talk about what’s going on. I’m not sure if this site has enough traffic, or if the readers of this site would have any interest in becoming a participating member of the forum, so do me a favor and let me know if you like the idea.

If I decided to attach forum software to this site, I would us Vbulletin. Vbulletin is still the best forum software in my opinion and I have a few years of experience using it. I know of an Ajax powered shoutbox which could be used by the forum members as a chatroom, which would solve idea #1. The only problem with using Vbulletin is the price. It currently costs $85.00 for a lease of one year. I’d be willing to chip in $20.00 towards the price, would anyone else be willing to donate towards the forum? If so, let me know.

Those are the ideas I had floating around in my head and I figured I’d toss them out here to see if there were any takers.

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Comment by Sridhar Katakam on 14 August 2007

Instead of Meebo, why don’t you try https://pibb.com/ ?

And, coming to a forum..I agree that vB is the best, but since it costs money, why not settle w/ PunBB or SMF?

Comment by Jeffro on 14 August 2007

I have tried Pibb before and from what I could tell, their userbase is really small. Also, you have to sign in and be a member of a specific service in order to use the chat, unlike Meebo which didn’t exactly require the user to create an account.

I have been thinking about using PHPBB3 but the final version has yet to be released. I suppose I could start off with PHPBB3 and later down the road, if the oppurtunity presents itself, I can grab Vbulletin as Vbulletin provides an importer piece of software which would help me migrate things over.

Thanks for your feedback.