If you want to skip the intro my forum is
www.hauntedpaulding.com – still making plenty of changes and it’s not 100% yet. Though I got a signup today without posting about it in my FB pages… just goes to show that maybe some of my old users are still wanting it back up.
Here’s my intro if you’re interested…
[spoiler]Thank you for your help so far, everyone. I’m sure it won’t be the last time I ask. But hopefully once I understand SP more I can help others.
I’m wanting to rebuild a forum that I’ve ran since 2006. Some time ago the server that housed it crashed entirely and I lost everything. 1000+ members, 30,000 posts, and so on. It was large considering it’s focus was just for my home county. Needless to say I was discouraged and didn’t feel like starting from scratch.
Now I’m getting ready to launch a documentary in October and I’m hoping I can rebuild the community so I have a nice large list of users to push possible DVD sales to after the screening that’ll be taking place.
When I first launched I was running vBulletin and honestly.. I had no issues with it. I would have stated that vB was the best forum software I had used at the time. Having only tried IPB, phpbb, and so on. Before vB I was using BurningBoard and I loved it but the spam control options were limited and the spam ran rampant.
When my vB license expired I switched to SMF and converted everything that the system would let me. But spam seems to be a big problem for SMF, too. Even the spam mods were useless. I was being forced to check my forum multiple times a day and clear out the crap.
So now you’re briefly caught up lol
This time around I wanted to find a forum that would integrate easily with WordPress as I would like it to be 80% forum – 20% blog and it made sense to see what plugins the WP world offered. I had tried others a while back, including this, and I always said to myself “well when I feel up to the task.. SP is what I’m going to use”. So here I am, trying to get everything back in working order.
I decided to shell out for a silver membership because I wanted access to some of the advanced features and didn’t feel like writing any code myself. But I actually had started to and it worked but not as well as I had liked. my php/mysql skills are rather limited. I can do almost anything inside WP but stand-alone coding.. I’m an advanced-beginner AT BEST.
So far I’m really like SP and I don’t see myself wanting to change any time soon. I can see how far it’s already come and the potential is endless.. what really makes it special is it’s WP integration. All the other plugins that give you forum capability don’t really “look” like a forum.. they’re more discussion boards and I’m one of those that sees a difference in the two. I wanted a forum that looked like the others I had used in the past and I found that with SP.[/spoiler]
