10 years of UBB

[bessler73]

A recent OS upgrade in our forum server wiped a 10 year old 150k+ user UBB board. And No backups of the data was to be had.
We had planned on upgrading to Vbulletin for a few months but working out the logistics of it was holding us back. We had UBB set up as a seprate install for each site with a shared user table. We are not sure if the data from the old forums will be recovered hopefully they will be. Till then have been rebuilding each sites forums templates and trying to restore the look and feel of the old ones using a single install of Vbulletin.

This is a MMO network and have been looking at some mods and frankly was wondering if people had any suggestions for ones we should have. We also have a Off Topic forum that is 18+ and found a mod that allowed us to lock the forum by age. But the only disclaimer mod I could find used ajax which works for some and others well ad blocker and we have some tin foil hat people that shut off java.

Any suggestions or links would be helpful we are using 3.7 and the forums are located at
http://vboards.stratics.com/

[cheat-master30]

Depends exactly what kind of forum you want. For example, for a forum with a lot of flashy add ons and stuff, there'd be mods like the arcade or points system, while for a more content focused one I'd assume more practical, minor modifications. Blog or Gallery system may or may not work for just about any kind of forum.

[bessler73]

One of the things we used to have was a paid subscription service that would remove ads network wide. We still want to add that back in and figure out a way so the sites can check a cookie like the old system and remove ads.
But more then that we wanted to offer a more robust subscription service that would allow unique features like albums. One of the old perks was the ability to have multiple avatars and sigs. Something I have not been able to find as of yet in Vbulletin.

We would like to be offer a forum that a user can hang out in and have more to do then just lurk. But at the same time not overwhelm the normal user. Kinda of a catch 22. We have been playing around with VBDrupal as well. Our sites use Drupal for news and content so switching to VBDrupal is less of a challenge DB wise. However a switch to VBDrupal is months if not more away. A point system sounds intresting we did not enable the reputation system, fear of it being abused big time.