What extensions are needed?

ChallaPradyumna

What are the extensions needed to be developed/installed to make a flarum installation similar to vBulliten or IP boards ?

jordanjay29

vBulletin and IPB have many more features than most free software out there. What in particular are you looking for?

Understand that there may be some extensions that do part, but not all, of what you want. There certainly is something about "you get what you pay for" with those boards.

wignu

jordanjay29 ... There certainly is something about "you get what you pay for" with those boards.

Not with VBulletin, all you get is a steaming pile of s***e that you've had to pay for.

jordanjay29

wignu I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make comments like this in a support topic that isn't yours and isn't related to the topic at hand. This obstructs my support effort and is against our Community Guidelines, as per:

Ask yourself if your reply adds to the discussion. If it doesn't, give it some more thought before posting

and

If your reply is likely to divert the course of the discussion, consider starting a new discussion instead.

Feel free to create a discussion in off-topic to discuss your subject. However, I'd ask you to review the Community Guidelines before you do to ensure it's appropriate for our forum. Thank you.

comicsmuppet

That's an interesting question, @ChallaPradyumna. Especially because the real benefits of both vB and IPB are often not visible to many users of the platforms.

Asides from all the PR (marketing around features, which often is the result of the age of the platforms), the true strength of both is that they can deal with very large communities. Sure, server load is server load and hosting requires upgrading (or more cloud computing units) as forums grow, but both vB and IPB truly grew in strength back in the day when MSNBot would literally DDoS pretty much any forum with several 100k posts/threads.

If you go back to 2002-2003 this was truly the horror scenario for many forum webmasters. The necessity to start optimizing URLs (especially for Google), combined with the serverload both MSNBot and GoogleBot would cause back in those days. The monthly MSNbot visit was evil, but a necessary evil.

In those days vB and IPB especially came to the fore as solutions which had those covered and also offered 'archive' versions. Bandwidth was still a thing then and the true strength of IPB and vB were (given decent enough hosting obviously) their speed, capacity to deal with large number of users, caching, and search query return.

And their preparedness for searchcrawlers. vB was also one of the first (affordable) forum solutions to offer CMS functionality (you could build a portal and forum posts could become 'news articles', almost like blogs - the Slashdot website still is rather reminiscent of how 'forum portals' would look bad then, complete with threaded comments shown as 're:' links).

One of the easiest open source solutions to similar functionality then was PostNuke, which was pretty much 'CMS/portal with easy phpBB forum integration - simplified, don't beat me up for this large misrepresentation due to simplification). But security and speed, scaling was what Invision and vB had focused most on. Plus the whole forum administration kitchen sink.

Invision since has evolved more along the path 'we've thrown every possible kitchen sink we could find' in the feature list and additionally we are even serving it all from pay-for-your-needs cloud hosting.
vB Has come very much to a standstill and still sell the old 'try hacking our software' as main feature and unless configured wrongly, vB does well in that aspect. Although I would still recommend to include Akismet or any other decent anti-spam solution.

Synopsis
Way too many words if I could have said things as simple as: So far I doubt any Flarum setup has reached a point yet where the true differentiators of vB and Invision can be compared (administration/maintenance kitchen sink, speed for very large forums, caching).

All the rest... many of their 'other features' you won't miss them unless you're a die-hard BB forum rat and not open for change. True usability of both is achieved thanks to... extensions.

Disclosure: the fully fledged CMS, social network, and then some Invision is difficult to compare to Flarum. One's forum software, the other is 'hey, we could also add that'. ?

ChallaPradyumna

comicsmuppet Thanks for the great insights. When you look at a forum/board in its simplistic form it's just a bunch of discussions and comments but there are lot of not so evident features that users expect by default and have become industry standards for any kind of forum framework. Since flarum is taking the extension way of doing everything other than the basic topic-comment as core. I was wondering what are the basic set of extensions that needed to be installed to make a flarum board as feature rich as vB or IPB.

For ex as of now the extensions i have on my flarum installation are

Tags, Image Upload, Analytics ,Approval , Emoji, Facebook, Google Login, Likes, Flag, Lock, markdown, Media Embed, Mentions, Share Social, Sticky , Subscriptions, Suspend, Tags.

I am pretty sure there are a number of features that i cannot think of as now but are default on the others. If we can come up with a list of things that are yet to be implemented someone can pick them up if they are interested. Eventually come up with a Default setup that is as feature rich as vB/IPB.

On the lighter side never thought i would run into slashdotter ( Shoutout to Slashdot) . Is it still a relevant thing ?

jordanjay29

ChallaPradyumna On the lighter side never thought i would run into slashdotter ( Shoutout to Slashdot) . Is it still a relevant thing ?

Yes, although their new management has come under a lot of criticism for the choice of frontpage articles.

Anyway, if you're trying to get to feature parity to vBulletin or IPB, you're better off going with vBulletin or IPB. That's not to say that Flarum can't successfully replace one of these on your site, but you really need to know what your forum cannot do without. With so many features in vBulletin and IPB, attempting to replicate all of them (the kitchen sink, as comicsmuppet so eloquently phrased), would be pointless if you only need a small subset of them.

ChallaPradyumna

jordanjay29 Personally i did not want to put up one of those run of the mill ,aged looking boards , that's how i ran into flarum. Which is a breath of fresh air in this area. Also since laravel is like a home ground to me it will be easier to integrate the forum into our company apps. Replicating all of them would be pointless. Currently as of now flarum works for me, the community is also getting bigger day by day. Should not be a problem to get it to the levels of others. ?

comicsmuppet

jordanjay29 Anyway, if you're trying to get to feature parity to vBulletin or IPB, you're better off going with vBulletin or IPB. That's not to say that Flarum can't successfully replace one of these on your site, but you really need to know what your forum cannot do without.

I should have added one more point to my extensive previous post, but it only came to mind when I had hit publish already and was in another topic.

There's a basic, a primordial, a DNA difference between Flarum (Discourse) and bulletin boards of old. Flarum is created for the era of mobile devices, bulletin boards were created for desktops. Desktops and their browsers are always more susceptible to become kitchen sink-cases (think extensions) than the mobile era.

When asking questions such as 'feature parity with vB/IB' it is important to remember that the focus, the era is different. Flarum is created to compete with Facebook, Instagram... to function in an era of ADD, side-door visits, and single focus apps. Older bulletin boards were created in eras where revenue was made because of pageviews, even not unique views.

It is somehow ironic (but not more ironic than anything in Alanis' song) that the core of the Flarum team is German. Fora have traditionally been really strong in Germany and having myself at a time operated one of the then larger Windows XP communities in Germany I can add to that that one of the reasons for their continued popularity mid '00s (when blogs truly started to pick up pace) was how easy it was to find advertising money.
All you needed was the ability to serve 50k ad views in 3-5 days and you had yourself a flash overlay advertising campaign every week.

Times have changed though.

Flarum is both optimized and being developed to serve the mobile generation. As such 'feature parity' will be difficult because mobile devices, and browsers, aren't suited for many features those older bulletin boards have historically developed. The core DNA of Flarum is totally different.

MY Tips
Rather than search for feature parity, start with a blank Flarum install and when you lack a functionality (and three days later you still need it), add the most appropriate extension to fill that need. ?

jordanjay29

comicsmuppet MY Tips
Rather than search for feature parity, start with a blank Flarum install and when you lack a functionality (and three days later you still need it), add the most appropriate extension to fill that need. ?

Pretty much.

That said, our team is quite multinational. Toby is Australian, Franz is German, Luceos is Dutch, Dominion is an American ex-pat in Japan, and Kulga, Digital and myself are American. Not trying to burst your bubble, but the German engineering take isn't quite accurate, Toby's the main brain guy behind Flarum, so one could argue Flarum is an Australian product (his original partner, as seen in the Kickstarter campaign video, is also Australian).

comicsmuppet

jordanjay29 Not trying to burst your bubble, but the German engineering take isn't quite accurate

Oops. My bad. Seems somehow I thought Toby was German. And hey... that wasn't a bubble, those not German should take it as a compliment. Germans are known for quality. ? [/OTT]