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Achilleus

By Achilleus,
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Achilleus
Achilleus
Posted
Posted

In my use of this forum, I've noticed the page load times are out of control. At one point pages were taking 10 seconds to load, and trust me it's not my connection :)

 

How can we solve this?

 

By switching to SMF. SMF is free, open source, VERY fast, etc. I host 4 different SMF forums and I'm on the doc help team at SMF. I'm obviously very familiar with it :D You can try it out at http://www.simplemachines.org/ if you're curious why free is better. On a site like this, I'm guessing you could take your page load times down to 2 seconds or so by switching to SMF.

 

Oh, and searching the forum would actually show useful results. I've used IPB before and don't get me wrong, it's an alright forum *cough*, but SMF is sooooo much better. Especially SMF 2.0 whenever it comes out to the public, I've got a beta site running right now. If you're interested in seeing what the beta can do, send me a PM and I'll give you an admin account to play around with on my test site. Even the 1.1.3 version is far better then any other forum software out there.

 

Using SSI and their converters, it would be VERY easy and painless to convert this board from IPB to SMF. Integrating it with this site and theming it would be pretty easy also, I could probably do it all in < 2 hours or so. Then again, I've had lots of experience doing it. But if you guys want to switch it over, I'll help out any way I can. It's just superior in every way you can think of, so I had to say something lol. Far more intuitive then this. SMF slays phpbb, puts it in an IPB coffin, and buries them both with the ashes of vBulletin.

 

Anyhoo the site is great other then the forum {censored}software you're using :D haha jk.

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Sabr
Sabr
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IPB is the best forum software out there (in my opinion). SMF may be lighter in terms of size, but it's definitely not as nice to use. I think if we were going to switch forum software, then the next one on the list would be vBulletin. We already have ourselves 'settled' down with IPB and all the plugins we use (for example, the report centre, or the portal software on the homepage). Going through the whole process again for SMF would be tedious and not worth the time involved. Plus, we also would have to port this theme, which has been specifically designed for IPB. I think at the end of it all, if we did move over to SMF, more people would be pleading us to move back to IPB because of bugs/problems with SMF.

 

I admit that the search feature we have here is extremely unuseful and doesn't help at all. But you can simply solve it by going to google, and entering: "site:insanelymac.com [search words]".

 

Also, changing forum software isn't necessarily going to improve your speeds. It's also dependant on where you live, where the server is based, your internet conection, etc.

 

- Sabr. :)

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Achilleus
Achilleus
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If I made a replica of this site using SMF would you consider it? A near complete replica that is, I'm not sure which portal software you use. It looks like Joomla but so far I haven't really seen anything that couldn't be done with a little bit of SSI and some custom coding. SMF 1.1.3 is pretty bugless. When you say report centre, are you talking about a bug tracker?

 

This site is moving along much quicker now, but then again it's 4am =\

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hecker
hecker
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Posted
about 300 MB
Which actually tells you nothing of the complexity or the structure of the DB at all. What you need to find out is what the schemes of this forum look like vs to those being mentioned in the above post. Only then will we be able to draw comparisons.

 

cheers,

 

hecker

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R2k.
R2k.
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by my opinion vBulletin is the best.

smf is nothing special but php is real sh#t.you can hack php forum with Firefox...

smf is for small forums,and for the people who never had a forum ...

 

this forum system is really great and different.

i mean it have nicer look than vBulletin,beside theme,the concept is better ...

 

~R

 

p.s. imagine coverflow forum ....mmmm....long live mouse wheel !

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mifki
mifki
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Posted

back in july the whole db was about 700mb (just the tables), even after being optimised, IPB is still oe of the best commerical forums available, i agree with R2k in him saying that smf is for small forums, i see it that way as well, the competition is still between IPB and vBulletin, just because its free, doesnt mean its good. To prove my point, look at linux :D

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mifki
mifki
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It's not the best, but it is much better than linux imo (well at least all the distro's i've tried). But then again, thats only my opinion, peoples opinions will vary greatly, such as those who think smf is great and linux is a godsend who are just plain idiots ;). Then again, my opinion.

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Achilleus
Achilleus
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by my opinion vBulletin is the best.

smf is nothing special but php is real sh#t.you can hack php forum with Firefox...

smf is for small forums,and for the people who never had a forum ...

 

this forum system is really great and different.

i mean it have nicer look than vBulletin,beside theme,the concept is better ...

 

~R

 

p.s. imagine coverflow forum ....mmmm....long live mouse wheel !

 

VERY small forum right here and it's running SMF. Look at the users online :P

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R2k.
R2k.
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Here too but like Sabr said very nice,smf don`t have some extra add ons like ipb or vbulletin.

like the name saying for itself simple machine ...

and like i already said,and don`t have smf but i don`t like it very much.

my ranking :

 

1.vbulletin

2.ipb

3.smf

4.php

 

 

:bag:

 

 

 

~R

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Achilleus
Achilleus
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SMF is kept simple--for good reasons. YaBBSE was starting to get bloated with features, and there were even people illegally renaming and distributing YaBBSE with a lot of mods pre-installed. SMF is kept very simple for a reason: most users don't need all kinds of crazy stuff. For example what use would this site have for a gaming clan mod? Little to none. SMF doesn't preinstall anything that most forums wouldn't need, but when somebody suggests something good it's added.

 

I don't know if you guys know this or not, but IPB used to be free too. In fact they used to say they'll never go paid. I've been in the forum scene for a long time, I've installed and used nearly all the forums out there. Why is SMF my favorite? Because in the very few years they have been out, their product has been the most secure, lightweight, fastest, and most rapidly improving forum software on the internet. I've used vBulletin and quite frankly I can't see why people like it so much other then the cost of it makes it seem and feel like it's good software--when really it's not.

 

Many people cite that the interface in SMF is not user friendly or intuitive--this mostly because they have used older SMF packages. Hell, in 2.0 you can search the admin panel! It is all very well organized and easy to find what you need in 1.1.x. 2.0 also features cascading/dropdown menus and a moderation center, visual warnings, complete control over profile fields, etc. Combine that with a superb search feature(which nearly ALL forums use most of all) and this makes it the best, and yes that is even beating vBulletin and IPB.

 

I understand if you don't want to switch to SMF since you have this stuff already done already but I was just making a suggestion--and this post is just defending my suggestion :angel:

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Sabr
Sabr
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Posted
SMF is kept simple--for good reasons. YaBBSE was starting to get bloated with features, and there were even people illegally renaming and distributing YaBBSE with a lot of mods pre-installed. SMF is kept very simple for a reason: most users don't need all kinds of crazy stuff. For example what use would this site have for a gaming clan mod? Little to none. SMF doesn't preinstall anything that most forums wouldn't need, but when somebody suggests something good it's added.

 

I don't know if you guys know this or not, but IPB used to be free too. In fact they used to say they'll never go paid. I've been in the forum scene for a long time, I've installed and used nearly all the forums out there. Why is SMF my favorite? Because in the very few years they have been out, their product has been the most secure, lightweight, fastest, and most rapidly improving forum software on the internet. I've used vBulletin and quite frankly I can't see why people like it so much other then the cost of it makes it seem and feel like it's good software--when really it's not.

 

Many people cite that the interface in SMF is not user friendly or intuitive--this mostly because they have used older SMF packages. Hell, in 2.0 you can search the admin panel! It is all very well organized and easy to find what you need in 1.1.x. 2.0 also features cascading/dropdown menus and a moderation center, visual warnings, complete control over profile fields, etc. Combine that with a superb search feature(which nearly ALL forums use most of all) and this makes it the best, and yes that is even beating vBulletin and IPB.

 

I understand if you don't want to switch to SMF since you have this stuff already done already but I was just making a suggestion--and this post is just defending my suggestion :)

 

Searching the admin panel in IPB:

 

admin.JPG

 

Visual warning thing/pop up info box (showing the moderator action / report centre):

 

assistant.JPG

 

IPB also comes with a simple built-in portal for the homepage (which we currently use). I just don't see what SMF has to offer that IPB doesn't already have or can't do.

 

Anyway, I appreciate your suggestion, and if you have any more, please do share them with us. :P

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  • 1 month later...
~pcwiz
~pcwiz
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Posted

I like SMF but I can't say its better than IPB. SMF is undoubtedly the BEST free forum software out there but IPBoard beats it still. I am making a forum for my site now (my current forum is stored on a subdomain and is running on phpBB) and I am doing it with SMF.

 

EDIT: Another thing is that I would prefer SMF over vBulletin any day. Don't have a clue why vBulletin is held in such high regard...And also SMF 1.1.4 has been released and some bugs have been fixed. Achilleus, can you please give us a link to the SMF replica of InsanelyMac you made?

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mifki
mifki
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Posted

realfolkblues, that was the most stupid comment i have ever set eyes upon. more than 80% of the internet is running linux, Google is a website, not a linux distro, Linux as a server OS is very good imo, i use it on my servers, but the desktop versions of linux still are pretty flaky (suse is a exception, but since novell ditched it it has dropped quality imo) . No matter what you say, poor industry support leads to poor drivers (look how long it took to make ati drivers). If you want a quality product you are going to have to pay for it 99.9% of the time. So next time you say something completely stupid while thinking you are smart, think before you say it, as that post is utter garbage. Its like saying, "you dont like trees getting cut down?, then dont use toilet paper"

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