Things I Always Forget When Setting Up vBulletin
brandondrury
vBulletin is not the most popular non-free forum script on the web for nothing. It has a ton of features, everything seams to be extremely well thought out, and when you do something, it’s probably going to work (as good as any other script I’ve ever used anyway).
However, one major drawback of vBulletin is it’s power. It has so many features that it takes a while to setup. Even worse, now that I have my home recording forum setup pretty much how I like it, I don’t have a clue to as to what I did to get it that way.
So here I am setting up the Textlinkcenter forum and nothing is setup how I want it. The plan is to take notes of the buttons I push so maybe I won’t have to play the guessing game the next time I setup vBulletin.
Unfortunately, I’ve already done quite a bit of work here on the Textlinkcenter.com Forum, so I’m probably going to be leaving some stuff out.
#1 - Thread Display Mode
This is the control for the order of the posts. I always forget which way I want this set. I always want the oldest posts at the bottom of the page, and I guess that is clearly labeled with the “Linear - Oldest First” setting, but I never seam to get it right.
vBulletin Options > User Registration Options > Deafault Registration Options
You can also set this in your Profile.
#2 - Quick Reply
I don’t know about this one. I guess I like having quick reply, but it makes me lazy. I end up not using little smiley faces when I say something disgusting and someone ends up burning a cross in my yard.
I hate the “Yes, Click Required” method with Quick Reply, but the vBulletin admincp is strongly against using “Yes, Click Not Required” even though I haven’t had a problem with it.
For now, I’m going with disabling Quick Reply altogether. We’ll see if I miss it.
AdminCP > vBulletin Options > vBulletin Options > Message Posting & Editing Options
#3 - Automatically Quote Post / Thread Title
No one seams to bother filling out the title when responding to a thread. I never really saw much of a point in summarizing my post anyway, especially if it’s a short post. Of course, there is a blank spot where something should appear so I’m happy with turning on the “Automatically Quote Post / Thread Title” feature. It gets more keywords into the thread (maybe too many) but at least it doesn’t look stupid.
You can find that here:
AdminCP > vBulletin Options > vBulletin Options > Message Posting & Editing Options
#4 - Email Address to Notify About New Members
I want to know when new members sign up. I setup a folder in Outlook Express to put these emails into a special folder. This lets me see, at any time, know how many new forum members have signed up this month without having to do any fancy logging in or whatever.
Of course, early on in the forum launch phase, I like to email these new members and tell them how important they are, etc. You’ve got to wine and dine the girl before she’ll have any real fun with you and setting up this feature is a good way to stay aware with what’s going on in your new forum.
Actually these “wined and dined” forum members end up being the ones that stick around for the long haul. Maybe I should always wine and dine, but that gets expensive!!
vBulletin Options > User Registration Options
#5 - Attachments Storage Type
I don’t like storing Attachments in a database. There are various reason for this. I always envision being in a mad dash to backup my forum database before the FBI busts down my door (old habits from the P2P downloading site days, I guess).
Anyway, I like to keep the database small. When I’m dealing with the database, I don’t want to take an hour to download images, attachments, and whatnot. I want to do what I need to do with the database and be done with it. I can always upload images and such later.
Also, vBulletin will run a tad faster when it has to make less MySQL queries. This won’t be a robo, life changing increase in performance but I think it’s worth doing.
Attachments > Attachment Storage Type
There will be more coming as I fight the vBulletin Setup Curve.
