Required vBulletin Forum Mods
brandondrury
If you are using a vBulletin forum, there are a handful of REQUIRED mods to drastically improve your chances of running a successful forum. In no particular order, here are the mods that I’ve installed on the Text Link Center Forum from the start (currently there are just two members, myself and lukesample).
Not Big On SMF
I’ve messed around with SMF forum from time to time. While I feel they have a very good forum script, it’s community support just seams lacking in my opinion. While SMF does have mods (many of them excellent), I don’t think, in general, the quality of the SMF mods is as high as the mods found at Vbulletin.org. There are a billion possible reasons for this. Not everyone will agree, but for my needs, I’m sold on vBulletin.
Welcome Headers - Improve Community Registration Rates
The best way to get someone to join your vBulletin forum is to ask them to. There are a billion ways of doing this, but I feel the “Welcome Headers - Improve Community Registration Rates” is one of the best methods. It puts a big message in just the right message that says “HEY YOU!!! JOIN!!!” without looking like a jerk screaming “HEY YOU!”.
Latest X Posts on Forum Home
Unless your site revolves around an incredibly tight niche, most forums are going to have several categories. You may as well display the very latest threads at the top of your index page. A person can always ignore them and go straight to their preferred category, but there stand a chance that they will now be aware of a thread that they wouldn’t have otherwise noticed before.
There are several scripts on vBulletin.org that perform this function. Most of them are good, but I’d stay clear of the javascript versions just for SEO purposes.
Email Reminder For Inactive Users
This once is fairly self explanatory. If a member joins and doesn’t post for a while, we send them an email that says “Hey, come on over to the forum”. I kind of look at the whole forum to member relationship in a way that I look at two friends. “The phone works both ways” as they say. So if a friend hasn’t come over in a while, invite them over. It’s automated! Some consider this to be a little excessive, but I think that being too afraid to send users a few emails is one of those “the only thing to fear is fear itself” issues. If your members didn’t want to participate in your forum, they wouldn’t have bothered to fill out that horrendous CAPTCHA form to join in the first place. People get distracted every once in a while, so don’t be shy about reminded them that you have a killer forum that they are more than welcome in.
NoSpam! - an alternative to CAPTCHA images
I’m not sure who came up with CAPTCHA. It was a great idea. The guy that figured out how to crack it with bots had an even greater idea. Those who still cling to using CAPTCHA in this day and age where bots can read them better than humans is ridiculous. Furthermore, the people that insist on using CAPTCHA images that are completely unreadable by humans are dillusional to the point of insanity. (Yes, I’m pissed!).
On a brighter note, some dude has came up with a much better solution. It’s one that I hope takes off throughout the web. We’ll see. It’s called NoSpam! and it allows you to simply ask a question. The user has to type the answer. It’s as simple as that.
