Before I make the jump to vBulletin

[brandondrury]

vBullletin has a rep for being the best. I don't deny that. I have a few special needs that I need addressed. If vBulletin can do that, I'm in. Otherwise, I'll just stick with the junk I have now.

1) I've read the guides about reputation. It's close to what I want. In fact, it's great on it's own, but I need another feature. I'd like to have a points feature. The points system would come automatically from posting. The more posts, the more points a user would receive. I would want to award more points to certain portions of my message board. I'm not concerned about spamming, because I will simply delete their post (and the points associated with it). The idea is to allow members to earn points and then trade them in for tshirts and various other items. In other words, I want to reward my users with real stuff. When they trade in points for stuff, their points will decrease just as if they spent money. This is the fundamental difference between my points system and the reputation feature. Can this be done? If it's not a stock option, could you direct me to the correct forum, person, or company that can get this done. Without it, I have little need for vBulletin.

2) I'd like a "Recent Posts" box as well to toss in my main site template. The links inside the box need to be search engine friendly. You can see this here: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/

Once again, if it's not a stock option, please direct me to someone who can make it work for me.


3) My seo guy is telling me that modrewrite can be a powerful feature. The idea of a forum thread having a filename that is the same as the title sounds appealing. Is it realistic?


Thank you,
Brandon Drury