Your greatest investment

What, in your opinion, is the best investment you have made in your forum?

For me, I must say that it has been to use vBulletin as my forum solution. But I haven't given it much thought and I cannot recall all of the investments I have made to-date.

 

I'm a lot happier when running vB... it may not have saved me money but it did save me time.

 

A computer system and Nintendo DS for my stepson. Helps keep him occupied when he is out of school and I need to work.

 

LOOL!!!

 

This is a bit of a tough question to answer - it's difficult to choose just one item and/or "conceptual" idea.

Purchasing both vBulletin and IP.Board licenses, by far, has proven to be an excellent decision. While I have nothing (personally) against the plethora of free forum scripts available for use, I'd rather go with a commercial script that has some sort of strong financial backing (i.e. thinking of the future of these scripts and their development). Sure - I could build and develop a successful community using MyBB, but I can't see myself using it, in all honesty.

I also feel that it's crucial to invest in some form of dedicated hosting, such as a virtual private server or a dedicated hardware machine.

 

I think just creating it did

 

x.x I only bought the domain....

 

VB was a great move for me a while back but VBSEO was the best investment I made.

 

I take it that you've seen some pretty impressive results then, eh?

 

vbulletin. And I just bought the blog as well. Will be adding it to my new forum.

 

It was a great investment, within the first month I started seeing lots of stuff start showing up on the first page in Google and visits went way up.

PS. Visits = $

 

My youtube account, and the untold hours I have invested into making my videos.

 

Who knows if it's brought in members or money, but one of the best things I did to set my best-performing forum apart was commission some custom graphics and smileys. People see them and know they're unique because they wouldn't work anyplace else.

 

x.x So many people say vB was a great investment.

 

We speak the truth! It's proven to be invaluable - members love it (and so do I).

 

I think it's worth it if it has some feature you really want to offer your community that can't be done--or can't be done well--on free software.

 

I have to say I was able to run a pretty active community (10k+ members) on a phpBB install, obviously with a few SEO mods etc.

The reason I upgraded to vb + vbseo is because my phpbb install was getting out of date, and I couldn't upgrade the version without losing all my mods so, I guess my greatest investment was VB, but only for security.

 

Domain name.

 

I think buying my iMac and MacBook would be my best investment.

 

vBulletin, without a doubt.