[donnacha]

Originally Posted by brainfood

... I have been going back and forth on whether to scrap VB and just go with Wordpress MU exclusively ...

Yeah, I know what you mean - the native WordPress/BuddyPress forums are looking more tempting than ever, especially the way in which they are cleverly separated into the social network's Groups, seems to work very well. Like you, I find myself wondering if it is really worth going to all this trouble to shoehorn a proprietary application, VB, into an Open Source application that is clearly evolving much faster.

For now, though, I'll keep this little campaign going, to see if we can't get some VB developers to realize how big BuddyPress is going to be.

Good to have you onboard, Brainfood.

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Originally Posted by nwingate

I've moved on so I'm dropping out from this offer. Sorry.

Sorry we didn't manage to attract the some developers in time for you to be able to use it; I really thought the VB developer community would have latched onto BuddyPress by now. Thanks for your joining in.

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Originally Posted by Taragon

I've been looking for a vB Blog alternative before, but now I think vB Blog is actually getting better I've stopped searching..

If we're talking about a perfect member profile page I am surely not dazzled or amazed by seeing buddypress.
This is an example of what I mean by perfect: http://wolfgar.digart.pl/ and this comes very close to it when talking vBulletin: http://www.absolutepunk.net/member.php?u=1083

With some time, effort and experience, it can be done. It'll only require some basic html knowledge to get a basic mockup even.

You know, these things are subjective but, honestly, your examples of "perfect" profiles are actually perfect examples of why vB Blog and the new vB social features have completely failed to set online communities alight.

Yes, I can see that the owners of those profiles put a lot of work into them, but that's part of the problem, you need to give your users something that works out-of-the-box, without them having to invest "time, effort and experience" - ordinary users run away from almost anything that requires effort.

It is worth noting that one of your two example profiles belongs to a moderator on that site, the other belongs to the site owner, so, they both had a reason to invest time, effort and experience into their profiles.

The BuddyPress demo may not strike you, with your particular tastes, as impressive but let me tell you what I see and what I believe most of my community members will see: a clear, simple system that they instantly "get". As I've said, the key thing here is not to just look but to actually sign up and give it a test-drive; for me, the first time I tried the demo felt like the first time I used an iPhone - it just made sense.

I know which approach I'd go for as a user and, as an owner, I know which one would do the most to give my online communities momentum.