Do users prefer a portal or just a forum?

[ntventures]

For larger forum owners, do you find your users prefer an entire portal system such as vbadvanced or just a plain forum? The reason I ask, is to some a portal may seem cluttered and detract from their quest to reach the forum. However they definately have a lot of great features. Which do users prefer?

Thanks
Tom

[chet]

our users like the portal feature that we have, although the portal does not do what we require as yet , still willing to pay someone to do it for me

Chet

[Oblivion Knight]

I'm not a big fan of portals, and sometimes they're enough to put me off from signing up to a forum..

[ntventures]

Is it possible to setup a forum in a backwards sort of way? Meaning the first thing they see is your actual forums and if they want, they can then browse to your portal areas from there?

[AN-net]

yes, setup your forums in your public_html folder and in there put a file called portal.php and then just link to that