Mr Heilemann says:

We've now been using these Vanilla forums for a good while now, and the traffic has skyrocketed way beyond anything I could've hoped or imagined for.

I've noticed however, that I am continually lost in the massive activity on here. It's hard to really keep track of what's new and what belongs where. It is of course not helped by the fact that the current beta I've installed is quite buggy; but I'll take full responsibility for that,

Anyway, I looked a bit at the other solutions out there, specifically what solutions that are being used on the forums I otherwise frequent. And as near as I can tell, vBulletin is the best solution out there at the moment. It's highly customizable, well supported and it works very very well. There's only one problem, it costs money.

http://binarybonsai.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=628

It's a shame as this was an enormous forum, and a huge advert for Vanilla and Lussumo.

It seems a bit quick to change their mind to be honest.

I'm not sure if VBulletin is the way forward either. Never had a good experience with that software.

I think they'd be better to wait for the fill release. They are using Beta and version1 release is basically ready.

It is too bad, but I can nevertheless see his point about keeping up with posts on an extremely busy forum. As nice as Vanilla is, it's just not something I could see behind a site like codeguru, gaia online, or some other huge community.

punbb is allright its lacking some key features. phpbb is probably his best bet.

I think the point is that Vanilla is much less categorically driven, and as such is probably much better suited to small and medium traffic sites (many times it's hard enough to keep track of posts in each category on some sites, let alone globally). While it is perfectly possible to turn it into a forum based largely on categories, it often makes more sense to simply use a forum designed for such a purpose. It'd be like modding punBB to look like Vanilla.

I think it has more to do with Categories having Subs. So you can make a Category named "Primary Colors" then dump a seperate category devoted soley to "red" "blue" and then "green". and really split things off as you need to. WIth other forums, so far that's pretty easy to do and comes as a core feature along with the stupid little folder icons next to the category title near the topic title.

That and users want their signatures, stupid rediculously-large avatars, and segregated private messaging with the ability to upload. Along with the post-whore stats, warnings and karma crap and other useless features (to me at least). Given, Vanilla at the moment is none of these (yet!) but it needs some time to evolve. We'll likely come up with some inventive extensions and plugins to get people high for a while. But Vanilla has only been in dev for like what? nearing 2 years, right? (excluding o8 mind you).

I don't think they made a bad choice, really, if they want to give people something familiar, more power to them. At least they tried it, found things they liked, and uncovered a few bugs we may have missed. Lets just not all turn into Vanilla zealots and start shoving it down their throat, they'll come around when they feel like it :)

I suppose it boils down to some people liking the plain forum style of Vanilla and others wanting every feature imagined.

(to be fair, there are only ever around 250 users online at any given time)

lech...totally agree with you. When I found Vanilla, it was a breath of fresh air as far as forums go. Systems like PHPBB and VBulletin are perfect cases of information overload. I run my system at 1024x768, and on most bloated boards, I have to scroll half way down the page to see any actual FORUMS. The top half is consumed with crap stats that mean nothing to anyone except an administrator or a moderator. The sigs that are allowed on most of those boards are ridiculous too, especially in threads that get a lot of traffic with multiple posts from the same users. Seeing their dancing unicorns and laser beams once is annoying enough...seeing it on every single follow-up post makes the thread virtually unusable.

I know that sub-forums can have their place in a high-traffic environment, but all that other stuff is just crap for the most part.

Vanilla is the perfect case for having a designer involved in the process. Systems like PHPBB are great examples of what happens when hard-core coders do design. Ick!

dknighton: you can say what you want about laser beams, but leave the unicorns out of this.

Yeah, but if you're going to do all the work to make Vanilla into a phpbb clone, you might as well just use phpbb and save yourself the effort.

If he is going with vBulletin he is just a dummie, after using Vanilla and punBB I know how bad the vBulletin and phpBB and such are, it's a crime how they are popular. It's like IE, people are so used to them that they rather use crappy software than something that is really pushing the envelope and thusly making innovation unable to happen, strange when Heilemann himself is a huge innovator.

tbh, vb used to be one hell of a script. i think that vb3 brought the bloat though, which is one of the reasons for the move to vanilla (for me). so fresh :)