Seeing Savvy vB Forums Before Purchase
 

I'm planning to set up a forum and seriously thinking of using vB as the forum software.

Before taking the plunge, I'd like to see the "best of the best," so to speak, in vB forums. I'm looking for forums that will blow my socks off, ones that are true eye candy!

This would be vB forums that are aesthetically pleasing because they sport cool templates, colors, graphics, mods, hacks and any other neat feature that can be applied to a vB forum. These are the kinds of things that forum users eat up and I want to give my up & coming forum community the best eye candy & feature set possible.

I don't know if there's like a Top 100 list of most savvy vB forums here, but I'd love to see them.

Can anyone direct me?

Thank You.

There's a thread of huge vB forums at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/ . There's also the monthly awards as chosen by other vB customers at http://www.vbulletin.com/award/ .

Have a look over on www.vbulletin.com at the board of the month, i think it's a topic under graphics. There are thousands of great forums powered by vBulletin.

Craig

Cool! I'll take a look right now.

By the way, I do want to mention one feature (non-aesthetic but nice) that I just found out about as a result of this post.

I checked off to receive email replies when someone replies to my post.

When I got the email reply, it said that I could reply to this message directly from the email with instructions! How nice is that? Have never seen that feature on a forum before.

Btw, I have to mention that this site is a savvy vB forum as well. :)

It's a hack that was written by Firefly. If you purchase vBulletin you can download it in the full releases section.

Unfortunately i've not been able to get it working on my forum.

Craig

Ah ok. I like that hack, really nice and convenient so that it's not necessary for the forum user to return back to the forum to reply.

For design: vb is completely template-based so VERY customizable. That is how your vb forum will look is only restricted by your imagination and HTML knowledge, not by vbulletin.

For email hack: Please note that this hack or similiar hacks would usually require dedicated servers as you may need to configure your mail settings in the server.

That makes it easy I suppose then because it's template-based. :)


Thanks for the tip also on the email hack....

For a nice looking vB forum, take a look at www.yaxay.com .

You won't believe this, but I spent about 30 minutes just looking over the Yaxay forum yesterday and I'm still in awe.

It's definitely unique and one of the best vB forums I've seen thus far!

I'm just curious to know the price range to customize a board so well?

Thanks for bringing it up though because I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. :)

For a board as extensively customized as Yaxay or mine (no, I'm not implying that I offer any design services because I don't and never have), it can cost thousands of dollars. However there are sites that offer styles for less. Also it shows more dedication towards your forums to design them yourself.

I would eventually want to customize a board this well but I knew it wasn't going to be a few pennies. ;)

Btw, your board is different and unique as well. I just viewed it.

The other board I found really neat out of the award list was Rapsearch.com.

You know, IMO, forums are one of the best things on the Internet. There are just a variety out there to please almost everyone and cater to almost everything, whether it's fun/recreation, life/living, hobbies, addictions, everything.

Just remember in the end, appearance is irrelevant (although it helped in my case :D). If you build a friendly community, people will come to it like magnets. Most of the comments I get about WDF at WDF is that people like the community and then they mention the style second. Building an ubercool-looking community with horrible members is just a dead site.

Too bad there is no "Get Members" button lying around here... :( ;)