[rharbison]

It was a very hard choice. I really like VB. I'm strongly invested in it, I own 8 licenses for crying out loud, plus another 6 or 8 for my various Photopost and Reviewpost installations. I know it like the back of my hand.

This was a small and fairly inactive forum. I had a Chinese spammer that was signing up 3 or 4 times a day, doing 4 to 8 new registrations each time. Different IPs, but they'd all show up in the same minute, so easy to tell. I tried everything, even going so far as using Cloudflare. No luck, he still got through, though typically StopForumSpam would grabs his posts. But I still had to clean up his crap.

So I bought Xenforo and simply installed the default antispam. It's been online for a week. Every time I'd check, anywhere from 4 to 10 guests were shown as "registering" in the last 15 minutes that it shows online guests. But... Exactly two have even been able to complete the signup. They were both trapped in the stopforum spam approval queue. It's really cool, as you can set what does based on what factors. So I have it tripping on the user name, which I didn't like in VB since it gave false positives on practically every simple name like "Bob" Works great, no spam at all. Compare that to VB which honestly acted like he had a hack to sign up and bypass all the antispam stuff.

Now I do expect that to change once the fact it's a Xenforo forum gets out there via Google and those guys show up. But there's an antispam add on that looks to be very effective when that time comes.

The more I use it, the more I like it. My members love it, clean, functional, easy to use. You can log in with Facebook. It has a built in "Like" button. Installing a photo gallery was so dang simple that I had it done in under an hour including buying and downloading the silly thing. Would have been 1/2 hour if I'd known that you have to set permissions for it to show up. Basically it's exactly like a VB plugin, upload some stuff and install the app. Compare that to the hassle of setting up Photopost. Oh, and when you're done, the gallery is truly and completely integrated, no separate cookies, no log in problems, it just frigging works.

Yep, this is the beginning of the end for me. The only thing I'm asking myself is "Why in the hell did you wait so long?!?!"

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