Modern Alternative to vBulletin?

[bchertov]

I'm losing patience with the slow development of VB4 and its clunky interface and limited feature set. I'm thinking of jumping ship and switching to something else within a year. But to what?

I'd like a modern web 2.0 interface, jettisoning the decade old paradigms of what a forum should look like, with a skin that doesn't need so much customization to make it look friendly. With lots of social features built, integrated calendar, business directory, html email notification and digests, etc. Along with all the things that VB said they would implement but haven't. You know, a full community site, not just a forum.

My forum's users are not long time forum pros. The expect the site to be intuitive and don't know about so many of the standard conventions that vbulletin keeps perpetuating. For instance, when my users come to the site and they want to post something, they are (were, actually, I fixed it) forced to pick a category before they could begin to post. Think about it. It doesn't make sense. That's software designed for the inside-out, from the computers/programmer's point of view, not the users.

And forcing you to click "Edit" to delete post! What??? I don't know if they turned off delete or what, but I just posted in the VB.com Testing Area and couldn't figure out how to delete my post!

Here's another thing that just hit me: there's no built in editor control to wrap text around an image - like above! I know it's fairly easy to do, and I have done so on my forum, but that should be standard!

On the plus side, for standard forum operations, the vb backend/engine is quite flexible and robust, but the user interface sucks!

JomSocial looks good, except it doesn't an integrated forum! Vanilla looks like a nice re-imagined forum, but it seems to be missing alot of other features (calendar for instance)

Have you guys considered jumping ship? What's looks good to you?