[Update: Vanilla forum software is no longer available]
What is Vanilla?
Jason listed 9 free, open source and phenomenal platforms that you might not know of, in this post at OpenJason. This is from where I came to know about Vanilla, a free forum software loaded with the goodness of being Open Source.
After being heavily engaged in forums till a few years back, I was once again introduced to forums and started participating heavily when Blog Engage forums were recently launched. Occasionally, I surf through The Admin Zone & Authority Blogger forums for my regular dose of informative stuff to effective blogging.
I have always fascinated owning a board for myself. I have set up and used phpBB and Invision Power Board on free hosts in the past, but this is my chance to own one and use it on my host and have it integrated with my blog.
Why a Free Forum Software?
Like I said, It has always fascinated me to own a board for myself and administrate a large active community. But to be very frank, I don’t have enough money to buy a vBulletin setup and I don’t really want to spend money on a phpBB board as it doesn’t provide the ultimate functionality as vBulletin forum software does. So, the optimum way out for me was to look around for a free forum software.
Okay! You can’t expect a free forum software to be as great as the market dominator forum software like vBulletin in functionality and usability, but when you don’t have money in your pockets, compromising is the best thing to do instead of complaining and giving up on the idea. Instead you should be working hard to extract the maximum of out of what is in easy reach.
Why Open Source Forum Software?
There are many proprietary forum softwares available for free use but the problem is that they can not be self-hosted or integrated with your blog/website. The benefit of using an open Source software (free forum software, in our case) is that you can use it on your own host & integrate with your own blog. You can easily get huge support from the open source community that is always working for some kind of improvement in the software. Bugs are found and fixed every minute and new stable releases are rolled out every now and then. Open Source is a good way to go while choosing versatile software to suit your needs.
It feels great to have come across Vanilla. I am eager to give it a shot and see how it turns out.
Forums at Inspirit:
I have finished setting up the vanilla forums for Inspirit | Blog. The forums will be named Inspirit | Blog | Forums & will aim at helping the blogging community and work towards blog promotion for small & new and big & established blogs alike.
Till the development work on the forums is complete, I do not want to publicize them only to kill ’em before they actually start up… Instead I will stick to the invite-only membership option and anyone who wants to help me in the development work like reviewing features, suggestion categories and discussions and/or provide feedback of any sort is most welcome.
Please comment to this post if you are interested, so that I can send you an invite. Your support is so much needed and will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for dropping in at OpenJason!
PM’d you. Count me in!
Sounds cool! I’m in.
Seeing your lack of activity I would think you forgot about our forums..
sad sad
bbrian017s last blog post..Why Are There So Many Pets In Animal Shelters
If you checked in earlier, you’d know that the forums were up for some time.. But the Vanilla UI wasn’t very admin friendly or even user friendly. So I dropped the idea at once.
I also thought it was better not to add to the already so big list of blogging related forums. Plus, my blog is all about blogging and discussions on anything related to blogging. We can do all things here, that we’d want to do at the forums.
And if you are a teenager, don’t forget to register at Teenager Forums Network
These forums are again based on an Open Source platform – SMF (Simple Machines Forums) board.
Thank you for your site 🙂
I made with photoshop backgrounds for youtube, myspace and even more
my backgrounds:http://tinyurl.com/6rbxmr
Hope you had a good day and thank you again!
I have a flash website
i’m looking for the script who of google adsense in flash.
can you give me the link?
Hi. I on numerous occasions scan this forum. This is the head together undisputed to ask a topic.
How multifarious in this forum are references progressive behind, disingenuous users?
Can I worthiness all the communication that there is?
🙁 If you know, how to do it. Please write. We need help Look at in the internet, but can’t find any information about this software. Please help. Thanks.
Greetings I’m new here
And it looks like a great forum, so just wanted to say hello! :):):)
And looking forward to participating.
Going on vacation for a few days, so i’ll be back
More open source software is always awesome to hear about. I am a little confused about one thing, though. I thought phpBB was also free, no? I suppose its been long enough that I’ve been mistaken, but I could’ve sworn I used it for a forum a few years ago… :/
I have used PHPBB and it was just a crap thing because it is too prone to be hacked and spam. I have lost a bigger community and discussions so I switched to Vbulettin, Till now I am more than happy to use it. I am wondering and desperate to know that should I rely on any other forum software when our losses would be unrecoverable.
Mikes latest published blog-post ………. News
Hi, I am new to know this forum, it’s look interesting and and I am looking for a good topic for this forum, I am not that professional with this like of conversation, but I am interested to listen and to join in a relevant discussions that make me me knew what I am not know. Thanks for sharing this topic..
Thank you for your site.We can do all things here, that we need want to do at the forums.
great site. Thank you for this useful piece of information. it helped me out a lot
.-= brad´s last blog ..What Are The Benefits Of Mobile Dual-Core Processors? =-.