Question on forums, php, vbulletin etc

[mikeb]

We're currently running a rather lame bulletin board. It's actually not even hosted on our site but rather at http://www.websitetoolbox.com.

I'd set it up orginally because it was easy and cheap. I know very little to nothing about php (still working on the amazon search owlcroft and going good albeit slow!).

The board gets very little input although we do get a lot of people signing up and I get...eh....a little traffic to the main site from it. However, the darn thing now has a PR4 which of course WE aren't getting.

I'm debating on keeping this or not. It only costs $40/year but kinda looks amateurish. If I dump it and go for another I'd probably use vbulletin. Is vbulletin hard to set up and more importantly...maintain? Do I need to know a lot about php before even considering this?

Thanks!

[Pyrrhonist]

You don't need to know much of anything to upgrade to vBulletin, and I don't find it very hard to maintain. The thing about vB though, is they give you the option to change EVERYTHING which can be a bit daunting at first, but if you read the manual on their site, you can get it all under your belt pretty quickly. If you don't want to install it yourself, you can check out the Mod_rewrite forum (http://www.mod-rewrite.com) where we offer SE optimized, installed vB forums for just a little bit more.

[amitbhawnani]

VBulletin is pretty good, not hard to setup or maintain, plus you could always post in their Forums if u land up with some kind of trouble...

U could also chek out phpBb, thats not bad either and its FreE :-)