Sell it to me then

ChemicalKicks

Well-known member
I like vBulletin but......

I also like Xen, I like the implementation and the way it all just seems to work. I particularly like the ethos driving development, that's not to say I think it's finished.

Now, say I where to buy a licence tomorrow, I'd like things to look "roughly" similar to how my forum looks now and I would want to do so with the minimum of fuss. So I would like a blogs section, I'd want a sidebar and I would want the theme to look generally the same.

Using off the shelf parts ie mods existing features would this be generally possible and if I would need to install plugins link me to them.

My site is www.the-sps.org
 
Welcome to Xenforo! The sidebar is a standard feature of XF. Here is a link to a really well built blog addon. I think you will find styling to be a breeze - especially if you've been able to work with vB4. You may want to give the demo a whirl if you haven't already...it may help you make up your mind. :)
 
Thanks for in info so far.

One thing I have noticed is how washed out some xensites seem, just can't quite figure out why the sites I've seen all look the same. Love the alerts.

I'm in work at the moment so will ask some detailed stuff when I get home.
 
Vbulletin looks also the same. Its the same structure everywhere, Others are trying to imitate vbulletin just to get the look and feel of it o_O
The basic appearance of XenForo is that what makes XenForo a XenForo. But styling it is really easy. I had no clue of css but since using Xenforo i ´ve learned it a bit better and do styling my board myself what I would never have done with a vbulletin
Xenforo is always a good choice (y)
 
I've been reading various threads across the site for the better part of a day now, starting to get a real appreciation for the software. I might just buy a license at the end of the month, Im a little annoyed at the added cost for branding free considering how much I've spent on vBulletin but hey ho.
 
Nope, it does not. If a member watch a thread with email notification, xF will keep emailing the address on file if it's bounced. You have to monitor the bounce return address and contact the member via other means.
 
Oh what I was getting at is does Xen know not to send further emails to an address that's bounced several times? Thanks for your reply though :)
No it does not. It will continue to blissfully continue to send emails to that email address until I intervene. Which on our forum I prefer.

For example:
UserA gets an email because someone sent a PM but they have moved to a new job/email address that is typically a "hard bounce". In that case I move their account 'State' to "Awaiting Email Confirmation From Edit" which suppresses all emails except for the email sent requesting another confirmation email. If it was a "soft bounce", I usually deal with it in some other manner.

There are 4 'States': Valid, Awaiting Email Confirmation, Awaiting Email Confirmation From Edit, Awaiting Approval.

Aside: We have various levels of approval on our forum. Everyone joins and is part of the Registered Users Group which has extremely limited features and has all content posted moderated and cannot initiate PMs. Eventually they are moved to the Approved Users Group where they are not Moderated and can PM. That could take minutes or months depending on a lot of different factors.

Typically the people that have their emails bounce are long standing members that are in the Approved Users Group. With the separate Awaiting Email Confirmation From Edit state as soon as they change their account email address to a valid one that they have access to and re-confirm their account, they go to exactly the same position (Approved Users Group) that they were. In vB which we used to use I'm not sure how to handle that scenario the way we use our forum.

Edit: More info here http://xenforo.com/community/thread...nced-email-addresses.12223/page-2#post-234379
 
Thanks for all your replies, it's something that I hope XenForo address at some point as it was something that has always been lacking in all (to my knowledge) forum software.

Going to have a read through that thread now :)
 
Thanks for all your replies, it's something that I hope XenForo address at some point as it was something that has always been lacking in all (to my knowledge) forum software.
I suppose it could be possible to detect a hard bounce and have the users state change if they were not in either the Users Awaiting Confirmation or Awaiting Confirmation from Edit - if someone knew how to do that (I don't).

But there are many soft bounces where changing their user state would not be appropriate, at least on my forum. In addition, emails do not work 100%. Yesterday I received 1 bounced email from a users account, but subsequent checking of that email account by sending emails to it - worked fine. It was a hiccup of some kind. On a large forum with tech savvy users those could have their account changed, but that would wreck havoc for us.
 
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