Hello SMF staff,
I've been using your server software for over a year and half, and I've been very satisfied. There's a handful of boards that I frequent, and since I'm a car nut, one of them (http://www.caranddriver.com/idealbb) is based on a popular Car Magazine, Car & Driver.
The forum software they're using is horrible, and has gotten to the point that I'm unable to post replies (or even edit posts), except by reloading the same page over and over again in IE. I asked the forum developers (since we don't get any response from the admins/moderators) regarding the issues, and the main developer stated that due to NDA, he could not discuss specifics at all.
However, turns out that the parent company of car and Driver owns several sites, and they're using this forum software across multiple servers/sites (like a server farm). I'm trying to persuade the powers-that-be to switch over to SMF. But in my attempts, I hit a bit of a wall. One of the biggest reasons they use this software because of its deployment across multiple servers through a single install. Here's a snippit of the features (I removed the forum's name, I don't want to give them free advertising):
Lainaa
[Name removed] can provide you with an unlimited number of bulletin boards from a single install. This means that it is now easier than ever to offer bulletin board services to your customers.
When hosting thousands of bulletin boards, it becomes much more cost effective to provide this type of hosting from a single install. When you push a new upgrade to the board, all of your boards receive that same upgrade. You do not need to apply the update to each board individually. This saves a lot of time and money and simplifies the whole upgrade process.
[Name removed] can also set limits on each board. For example, you can restrict the number of posts or the maximum number of users on each board. Using our API, you can easily create new boards and or close down a board. This makes it very easy to build a fully automated hosting solution around our product.
* Host multiple boards from a single install
* Utilize a single membership database for all boards
* Programmatically create/modify/remove boards
* Set limits on each board
* Track board usage
Does SMF offer something similar or will be in the future?
Thanks for your time
~Ben