By Hyper-1 on

What are the disadvantages or any lacking features of the latest Drupal release when compared to the two leading commercial forum solutions IP.Board and vBulletin? I've used both and can say they are equally fantastic solutions particularly for a forum-only website, and IP.Board has an excellent blogging component.

There's so much about Drupal that is sexy above and beyond what forum-only solutions can show, but to give others an idea of the deficiencies Drupal has if used as a serious message board focused solution, we should make a list of features we find important or useful. Forgive me if I list a few things Drupal already features as I haven't used it in a while.

1. Multi-quote
2. Emotions
3. Topic subscriptions by email
4. And some other moderation considerations which could make it more time consuming to manage.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

heine’s picture

heine commented

Perhaps, http://groups.drupal.org/drubb is of interest.
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JennR2000’s picture

JennR2000 commented

The emotions can be added fairly easily by adding another module or even adding a WYSIWYG like TinyMCE. The problem with the forums is how it's formatted. Like when you create a topic the first topic is considered a node and the rest are comments. The node itself has a lot more fields that it can be edited with then a comment. Also the way the node is edited is different then the comments so it changes the whole flow of the forum. This is just a small amount of things that is wrong with the drupal forums.

The one thing you will find when you mention that the Drupal forums are sub par is that the regulars don't want to admit that their forum module is seriously lacking when it comes to being a respectable forum. They will get defensive and I can almost guarantee that one will just brush off this post with a “We scratch our own itch” so in short the Drupal community knows their forums are poorly made but don’t care or are in denial. They don’t want to hear it.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/forum

Add contrib modules you need to build out the features you want in your sites forum. That's the point of the entire system of Drupal. But it's good to know your opinion of the contributing members of the community.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

Hyper-1’s picture

Hyper-1 commented

Thank you for the link, that basically got me up to speed with what's going on.

The only really off-putting thing is the prospect that modules may not be updated for future versions; a dead end and a frightening thing indeed. I'd like to see some safeguards put in place that would help prevent this from occurring. For example if there isn't much community support for it i.e. people asking for it or enough developers to work on it for many years into the future, it should NOT go ahead.

It better to have a basic forum than a fully featured one that is at risk of dying after only a few years.