Hi all

My question is what are the advantages and disadvantages of using vbulletin as my comment engine, instead of the “spammy” one built into word press. Also will it make any difference from an SEO point of view.

Thanks

The main disadvantage is that this plugin is your only option. While it works decently, and I'm certainly not trying to whine (obviously he does this for free), it *is* a disadvantage that this is the only real option for bridging the two.

For advantages, here's how I see it:

1. Using vBulletin, I've enabled my readers to have ongoing conversations with one another, NOT stemming from a post. This enables and encourages a bigger community, as users can pose their own questions.
2. Using vBulletin, I've basically created a socially acceptable duplicate of my content (the wordpress post, which is married to another page that contains the thread). This means my traffic is effectively doubled, and I have a whole new inventory of ad space to sell. That's good for me.

To be clear, though, before integrating vBulletin, I didn't offer readers any 'account' in my wordpress install. The only users I had were me and 2 other authors, plus a few test accounts. I also run it currently with integration turned off. There's no reason for readers to have access to the wordpress backend, in any way/shape/form.

You can check out my integration at http://www.symbian-guru.com.

I'm currently also struggling with the userid matching issue. However, if you have auto-integrate disabled, everything works, but authors are shown correctly (according to the person who clicked the publish button, though, not necessarily the author of the post).

@rcadden I like how you have set that up. It look nice. But doing it this way, wouldn't this give you duplicate content? What I am saying search engines would look at your site and you have the same content in WP as you do in your forums. I've always read that this is bad for SEO?

It is on the same domain so apparently not an issue. Symbian Guru (great site!) has a pagerank of 5

I just switched host and upgraded everything and now i'm trying to install this bridge from a fresh WP and vB installation.

I'm getting this error:

Installed
Great work Jafo, thank you

anyone an idea? :)

change mapping....... all those of contributors to "Subscribers"

Contributors are authors! :)

??? can u tell me about this one ???
thnxxx

sorry for being the n00b... but I couldn't get past the part testing wp to post in vb:

the files ARE there. don't know when its not able to open them :(