Should I Go SMF?

[Ghost Rider]

Hello my name is Kevan King; new CEO of Dragon Gamer (Dragon Gamer is making a program to help amature game makers make 2D RPG games; in short where making a game maker). Currently our forum is hosted on a Free Forum Service: Forumer; but being free they have poor support. So my next step was a paid IPB or vBulliten forum. Though they came up a bit $$$$$.

Now I have used SMF (as a member only) on many forums I am a member of; but I have a few questions before I go with SMF.

1) I can make great looking Skins for IPB; how easy is it to make skins for SMF?

2) I have had problams with Assistant Admins moving stuff aorund, and editing members accounts; is there a feature in SMF that will allow me to choose what a Admin can & can't do in the Admin CP?

3)  My current Host does not support PHP or My-SQL; so i will have to move; know of any good places to host a SMF forum?

4) My last question is how easy is it to learn SMF & to intergrade it with a website?

They may seem like newbie questions, but as I said I have only used SMF as a member. Do you guys have a demo forum where I might try all the features out?

Well I hope I posted this in the right area and as Head CEO of Dragon Gamer I thank you for your time & consideration in this matter.

---Kevan King (aka: Ghost Rider)  

[Eleglin]

1 / probably easier than IPB. The CSS is shorter.
2 / You can create a group 'assistants admins' and customize their access as you want. It's very easy !
3 / ---
4 / Very very easier than IPB !

[Ghost Rider]

Sounds good so far, I was more concerned about limiting what people can do in the Admin CP.

[Gary]

The good thing is that there are hardly any limits to what can go into the admin center, we have plenty of mods which you can install in literally four clicks, which most of the time, will add options to the admin center automatically.

1) I can make great looking Skins for IPB; how easy is it to make skins for SMF?

I'd say it's easier, in SMF you can change the CSS and even the actually layout in SMF much easier in SMF than IPB, from what I've seen, I've not seen a single IPB board where the template was edited to make it look different.

2) I have had problams with Assistant Admins moving stuff aorund, and editing members accounts; is there a feature in SMF that will allow me to choose what a Admin can & can't do in the Admin CP?

Yes, you create a membergroup for the co-admin, and apply the "allow" permissions on what you want them to be able to see and the "disallow" on what you dont.

3)  My current Host does not support PHP or My-SQL; so i will have to move; know of any good places to host a SMF forum?

We have a Hosts and Hosting board here, maybe check that out.

4) My last question is how easy is it to learn SMF & to intergrade it with a website?

Very easy, we have a file in SMF called SSI.php and ssi_examples.php (the latter is only a list of examples ) which will allow you to integrate SMF and your current website. Plus there are various portals like Tinyportal and several galleries like Coppermine which integrate, and bridges for CMS's like Joomla and Mambo.

I hope that helps

-AwwLilMaggie

[Ghost Rider]

Thank you very much this will help very much. Now I'm off to look for a host.

[Ghost Rider]

Alright I found a workable host. I plan on using these: people (click me).

So this plan would work for a SMF forum?

[KGIII]

They won't be in business long. It is called overselling to extreme.

[Ghost Rider]

Umm they have been in the Bus. since 2001; it's now 2007; that 6 years in the Bus.

AN Hosting, Inc. was born in early 2001. Within the next four years it would grow from a no-name company based out of a small Chicago suburb to a multi-million dollar web hosting company. Now, even with three offices in two countries, roughly 30 employees and thousands of customers (in over a hundred countries,) AN Hosting has never forgotten its roots as a startup.

We know that YOU are most likely coming from a bad hosting experience. We're good at just one thing: keeping your website smiling ;-)

[KGIII]

You'll see. You don't have to believe me, I have the utmost faith that the business model is not sustainable. (The math doesn't add up.)

I'd offer to place a friendly wager on it but people might frown on it so we could limit our ante to 5 push-ups and set an arbitrary date of 3 years from today?

[scissorhands™]

Its now 2007 for those who don't know.

Umm they have been in the Bus. since 2001; it's now 2006; that 5 years in the Bus.

AN Hosting, Inc. was born in early 2001. Within the next four years it would grow from a no-name company based out of a small Chicago suburb to a multi-million dollar web hosting company. Now, even with three offices in two countries, roughly 30 employees and thousands of customers (in over a hundred countries,) AN Hosting has never forgotten its roots as a startup.

We know that YOU are most likely coming from a bad hosting experience. We're good at just one thing: keeping your website smiling ;-)

[Ghost Rider]

Oh; ya my bad....

[Rudolf]

They won't be in business long. It is called overselling to extreme.

Yes, that's overselling or better said it's overadvertising.
99% of the customers will never ever use up 250 GB of space, and will never use 2500GB transfer. So this business model is the same as the 25GB space and 250GB bandwith business model They just say more to get more people to sign up. Not necessarily go out of business.
You will have to switch to a dedicated server long before you reach 250GB disk space and 2500GB. Because of the level of traffic you get, not because of your limits.

[KGIII]

Yup. I have seen one company who's managed to convince a few people that it works. We then have to deal with the complaints at the various forums and watch them learn their lessons the hard way. Some of those companies are still in business (though haven't been overselling this long) but it is only five push-ups so I can afford to risk it.

[Rudolf]

I wasn't saying it's a good thing.

[青山 素子]

1) I can make great looking Skins for IPB; how easy is it to make skins for SMF?

Making an SMF theme can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. Adjusting an existing theme to fit your colors and adding a logo is a very easy task, and doesn't need much technical knolwledge. If you want something completely different, then you need more knowledge of PHP. For an example of the flexibility the system offers, look at the online manual. It looks like MediaWiki, but actually is SMF.

2) I have had problams with Assistant Admins moving stuff aorund, and editing members accounts; is there a feature in SMF that will allow me to choose what a Admin can & can't do in the Admin CP?

Depending on what exactly you need to allow and block, it can be very easy to grant the permissions you want to the people you wish without allowing too much. The next version of SMF will give even better control.

4) My last question is how easy is it to learn SMF & to intergrade it with a website?

For basic stuff, it doesn't take much knowledge, but once you want to make some special customizations, then you will need to know a bit more (such as dealing with arrays in PHP). Actually doing the integration is easy, there is an API for that (see the SSI.php file) that provides a lot of pre-defined functions to get functionality.

3)  My current Host does not support PHP or My-SQL; so i will have to move; know of any good places to host a SMF forum?

It depends on your budget. If you can afford it, don't go with a cheap host, they skimp on many things to get their price so low (including a thing called overselling).


According to the AN Hosting site, you get 2.5 terabytes of transfer a month. To make that kind of transfer it would take, at a minimum a 7.72 megabit connection. Now, the cost of a single T1 (1.54 megabit) is about $300 (if you don't mind a cheap provider). You'd need a little over 5 of these to get this kind of transfer. That works out to $1500 a month just for the bandwidth cost. Now, bandwidth costs go down in bulk, so let's assume an (insane) 70% discount of standard price. That goes down to $450 a month.

Now, we know that not many hosting customers will use the limit, so we can decrease the cost. Let's say we think we can fit 5 customers into that bandwidth. We are now down to $90 a month. However, this means that you realistically are only allocated for 500,000 megabytes a month.

And note that this $90 is just the bandwidth cost, I'm not adding electricity, disk space, backup costs, support costs, maintenance, etc.

So, basically, for them to make money, they have to have customers that use a lot less than their offer. Usually, with this, you'll find servers that are overloaded, difficulty or slowness in getting support, warnings about hitting resource limits (cpu usage, mysql connection/query limits), or just general problems.

Now, most hosts will overstate their capacity, such is normal (as long as they can grow to fit customers that use as much as advertised) overall. For what they are offering, I would maybe expet to see $30 a month. However, with such insanely low prices for those limits there is no question they are likely selling way beyond their capacity and overloading their systems to try and make a profit.

[anketix]

Thank you very much  

[higherauthority]

YES GO SMF.  I have been running forums for years now.  I tried Invision - nice but expensive. BBC  - to easy to hack,   ezboard - is overrated and lacking functionality.

SMF has been my choice for the last few years. I NEVER LOOK BACK!!!!

SMF in my opinion has their act together. And have a good solid system.

[B Patterson]

If you're looking for a good host and a great price, I'd suggest Servage.  They apparently (not 100% sure about this) have datacenters around the world, and use a clustered setup.  They offer a very comparable package to Annhosting; however, their support is tremendous.  They started in 98 (uh oh.... they've got 3 years on Ann ) and have just been increasing the package they give.  It's a one package deal.  You get 250 Gigs space, 2 Tb Transfer, and mySQL 4 or 5, php 4 AND 5, and much more (including WAP).

I've been with them for about 6 months now.  When I signed up it was only 175 GB of space, now it's 250.  It's like gMail with them.  Their space continues to grow, and so does your plan.  Whether you need it or not, fee-free.


As for skinning SMF, I'm working on a theme now that is just spectacular.  Once the layout is done, it's just a matter of getting the template files coded (to loop through the posts and such), or just change the CSS and images   I think my first theme mod took me about 2 days, working for a grand total of like 8 hours on it.  Not difficult at all.

Integration into your website is easy as Pie with SSI   Create your own portal or use TinyPortal to mold your forum into your site.

But that's just my 2 cents

[Oldiesmann]

Servage really isn't much better:

AN - 250GB of space and 2500GB of bandwidth for $6.95/month
Servage - 250GB of space and 2100GB of bandwidth for $6.45/month

Most dedicated server plans don't have that much space or bandwidth...

[B Patterson]

Except for the fact that it's clustered.... so they can afford it easier.