[Twin-X]

Dear members,

For several years i have been hosting midibox.org with pleasure and wil continue to do so.

However this forum and it's members have grown in a positive way.
Unfortunatly i am struggling with the forum software and compatibility with addon's.

I believe that professional people deserve a professional lokking and functioning community.

Midibox needs to be beter organised where everyting should be integrated in it's most viewed page: The forum.

Long have i waited for vbulletin v4 to come and bring it over here, but they are trying to screw us license holders big time. I allready own a silent licence but i still have to pay $250 (wich wil be way more if i buy it after 30okt). And it does not end while it is 250 until V5 comes out i have to pay that ammount again.

So i have been looking for something else and my intrest has come to Invision Power Board.
(most vbulletin users are going there now ;))

However for a full suite i need $250. (after that it's $25 / half year whenever we need support or an upgrade) :( bummer as i do not have this money right now. I allready pay approx $680 a year for hosting midibox alone.

So please donate a few bucks and get me started on making the transfer to new software.

We can discuss ages about this but i really do preffer payed forum software over opensource stuff. It is very contradicting with what we do, but i feel it's best for us as it offers much more without alot of issues i have right now at update moments/ spamming etc etc.

Thanks for your help,
Jeffry

[strophlex]

Just contributed.

Do it you too  :D

[m00dawg]

Can I ask why you think vBulletin is better than SMF? I've seen both from the back-end and neither are amazing, but, as I work for a rather large server hosting company as MySQL DBA, you can imagine I see all sorts of things. I never see SMF issues. I often see vBulletin issues.

I have found their support to be downright shit according to customers I have talked to. Simple things like converting tables to InnoDB to avoid locking are things that vBulletin seems to know jack about. Now this is just from second-hand experience really but I see it a lot and it pains me every-time I do.

I'm just saying - SMF is free and open source. vBulletin isn't and I hold vBulletin to higher standards, and for as much as it costs, it should be significantly better than any open source forum out there.

As far as the donations, I would be happy to donate! I'm sure you at least have to pay for server costs which, with as large as the MidiBox community is, might be starting to get non-trivial. But I do ask that you seriously evaluate both SMF and vBulletin before you make your decision.

It could be that my experience has been quite skewed and vBulletin is vastly superior but just be sure to do your research. I also hope you have exhausted other avenues, including looking at optimizing and tuning your database. If you need help with that, be all means, send me a PM since that's what I do all day :)

[m00dawg]

Ah whoops, I see now you're actually also evaluating another forum software. Don't know anything about Invision but I would ask them a few critical questions, such as what their preferred back-end DB is, do they offer Sphinx (sphinxsearch.com) support and if not how do they handle searching, what is their stance on using InnoDB over MyISAM tables (assuming MySQL is the back-end DB). I would also ask them for references to high volume customers if you haven't done that part yet.

I don't mean to be critical so I apologize if I come off that way. Again, I don't know anything about Invision, but vBulletin often evokes a knee-jerk reaction because I see problems with it so much. It could be that all the issues I have seen are easily resolvable by upgrading to vBulletin or something changing some settings (I only really have dealt with the DB back-end).

Either way, no matter what you end up going with, the offer stands to look at the DB if you need help. Again, I do that day in, day out, so it's something I'm quite accustomed to and happy to help with!

[seppoman]

Hey Jeffry,

I just donated :)

Still, from a purely user point of view, I'd like to say that I really like the good old SMF as it is, even the layout/skin, although not the most modern or stylish, works well for me and doesn't really need a change. the vBulletin boards on the other hand, I don't like them very much. Can't really tell you what's wrong with it, it's just a feeling but usually I don't feel at home there.

Anyway, if there's urgent technical reasons to switch to vB, I guess I'll have to grow accustomed to it :)

S

[sineSurfer]

done!  ;)

[nebula]

Done! :)

[ssp]

jeff like i said im in for this, give a day or so to move funds to my account (when womans not looking as i feel a shopping day coming on;) ) and i will gladly donate

[rvooh]

what is wrong with SMF?

sorry if this has been discussed somewhere.

[Twin-X]

Quote

what is wrong with SMF?

It's community and support. We use some plugins made by the smf community that are not supported anymore or not updated in time to leave open holes in the software that scammers might use.

Quote

I just donated :)

vBulletin boards on the other hand, I don't like them very much.

Anyway, if there's urgent technical reasons to switch to vB, I guess I'll have to grow accustomed to it :)

I am looking at invision, vbulletin is getting more on the background for me so i think it is gonna be out of the question.
Thanks for your donation!!

Quote

Can I ask why you think vBulletin is better than SMF? I've seen both from the back-end and neither are amazing, but, as I work for a rather large server hosting company as MySQL DBA, you can imagine I see all sorts of things. I never see SMF issues. I often see vBulletin issues.

I have found their support to be downright shit according to customers I have talked to. Simple things like converting tables to InnoDB to avoid locking are things that vBulletin seems to know jack about. Now this is just from second-hand experience really but I see it a lot and it pains me every-time I do.

I'm just saying - SMF is free and open source. vBulletin isn't and I hold vBulletin to higher standards, and for as much as it costs, it should be significantly better than any open source forum out there.

As far as the donations, I would be happy to donate! I'm sure you at least have to pay for server costs which, with as large as the MidiBox community is, might be starting to get non-trivial. But I do ask that you seriously evaluate both SMF and vBulletin before you make your decision.

It could be that my experience has been quite skewed and vBulletin is vastly superior but just be sure to do your research. I also hope you have exhausted other avenues, including looking at optimizing and tuning your database. If you need help with that, be all means, send me a PM since that's what I do all day :)

I have worked with vbulletin from version 1.3 and in my opinion it is not shit and when emailing for support i usually got an awnser back within 15 minutes.
Because smf is free and opensource addon and other stuff depends on the community that is behind it. This can be slow painfull or buggy to implement. And still for me vbulletin is better then open source as i experienced. Most people forget that there are maybe 10 smf users where there are 100 vbulletin users. So yes you see more complaints and more attacks on that piece of software.
And i did research however vbulletin is messing with the licensing so invision is now the first in line. Very good community as far as i can tell good support also on the forums. Cheap and lot's of functionality i seek for the midibox forums.

[m00dawg]

I would still check and see what their support is for things like Sphinx, memcached, etc. Sphinx, in particular is *AWESOME* for full-text searching. MySQL's built-in solution works but forces you to use MyISAM. InnoDB, by contrast, offers much greater concurrency and performance (as long as it is tuned properly) and you can do nice things like transparent backups.

As for vBulletin support, it's moot if you're with another vendor, but my experience with them has been such that sometimes they acted like they didn't even know what InnoDB was or even recommended against it. So we ended up with customers with a super slow forum that were unwilling to try InnoDB (even though we know it fixed a majority of issues) because vBulletin didn't sign off on it. InnoDB has been with us since MySQL 3.23, so it is unacceptable for a vendor that uses MySQL not to know about it. And it's almost a disservice to paying customers not to at least properly evaluate its use.

*shrug*

[Twin-X]

smf uses mysql too so i don't see the big deal actually as we are not having 4000 concurrent connections per second over here.

I understand that other db's are better but i host a few other mebers as well over here and it is better to keep just 1 engine on the server instead of multiple ones.

invision has a few members running innodb but the devs do not reccomend it yet.

[m00dawg]

I assume you meant MyISAM when you said MySQL?

Either way, I agree, if performance is never going to be highly concurrent it matters less. But while things might not be highly concurrent today, they might be tomorrow. InnoDB can handle both and, in many cases (again, when properly tuned), can do so faster than MyISAM ever could. There are reasons for when MyISAM makes sense, but most typical web-applications can benefit heavily from InnoDB.

I am sad to hear Invision doesn't recommend it. Curious as to why, though I am not surprised. Most off the shelf applications don't use it, but most actually should. Drupal is a prime example, since it only recently has started to embrace InnoDB, albeit in a capacity far less that I would like.

Case and point, with MyISAM readers block writers. If someone is searching the forums, and that search takes, say, 10 seconds, if anyone tries to UPDATE the same table, that update will wait. But it's even worse because that UPDATE will not cause every other query (SELECT or otherwise) to stall until the search completes. InnoDB does not have that problem, because it runs SELECTs in their own transactions (even if you do not use transactions directly) and uses row-level locking. So things like UPDATE ... SET viewcount = viewcount + 1 could cause issues with MyISAM, as long as the same row is not being updated in InnoDB, these viewcounts can all execute at the same time.

Anyways, I've said my DB spiel. You know the forums way better than I so I am sure you will make the right decision! Obviously being a DBA I like to talk about DB problems :)

[netpusher]

Big thanks to everyone at MidiBox!  I posted a donation for hosting.

[Futureman]

Donation +1

[Wilba]

I donated my USD spare change ;) but I'll send more after there's a big pile of cash in there, ETA two weeks ;)

[puddingbrumsel]

Done!

[rvooh]

Quote

Quote

what is wrong with SMF?

It's community and support. We use some plugins made by the smf community that are not supported anymore or not updated in time to leave open holes in the software that scammers might use.

well being an unemployed php webdeveloper at the moment and probably for a while because of the economy, I'd rather fix those holes as donation-cash is sparse
if I may ask, what are the modules not supported anymore? maybe they can be replaced by something else.. I can have a look to see if I can help.

btw, with vBulletin it can go the same way you know..
A friend of mine owns a big music portal/forum (almost 10000 members).. One day he decided to embed vB into Drupal cms for content creation.. A lot of work, and now it's done, he's stuck there and support for the VB-Drupal combination is fading away. No way back it seems.

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[Twin-X]

Quote

btw, with vBulletin it can go the same way you know..
A friend of mine owns a big music portal/forum (almost 10000 members).. One day he decided to embed vB into Drupal cms for content creation.. A lot of work, and now it's done, he's stuck there and support for the VB-Drupal combination is fading away. No way back it seems.

What forum is that if i may ask?

[rvooh]

Quote

Quote

btw, with vBulletin it can go the same way you know..
A friend of mine owns a big music portal/forum (almost 10000 members).. One day he decided to embed vB into Drupal cms for content creation.. A lot of work, and now it's done, he's stuck there and support for the VB-Drupal combination is fading away. No way back it seems.

What forum is that if i may ask?

what, that friends forum with vb-drupal?

www.psychedelic.be

(edit: it's like the center of the goa/psytrance scene in belgium)