Can the forum software you use affect your members?

As in, the amount of members you get at your forum, and the types of your members you get there? Part of me thinks so, I've had people personally join due to the forum using vBulletin (I know because they told me directly), I've seen people on various forums say they'll flat out refuse to join any forums that either use free forum hosting, free software, or anything other than their forum software of choice, and I've seen similar people refuse to join forums with lots of features in the forum software. That's why I believe it has some effect, but do you share that opinion?

Note: Not counting if people are joining your forum due to your activity on the official support forums for the software. I've seen that happen quite a few times as well, with the various regulars on sites like vBulletin.com or the official Invision Power Board/phpBB/SMF forums often going to the same communities as each other and joining each other's forums as members, and I've seen a pretty strange case of this which I will not go into detail about.

 

Well to be perfectly honest I believe it does, I have only ever joined three forums that are not running vbulletin.

 

I'm glad someone else said that :lol:

Yeah... I'm only really active on vBulletin forums. I'd definitely join an IPB forum, and maybe phpBB ones (I am a member of forums running those two, but not very active for other reasons).

But the rest, I can't get on with at all so I wouldn't join unless I had to for some reason.

 

I am a member at three phpBB forums. One for a gaming guild that I belong to and its hosted on a specialized platform that only works with phpBB. The other three are support forums for software that I have purchased and you need to be registered to view them. I have never really posted on the support forums though. I am a member at Wordpress.org and they use BBPress but not very active there either.

I can't think of a single SMF, MyBB, or IPB system that I am an active member of or have registered at. I visit about a dozen vBulletin forums semi-regularly and 6 or so on a regular basis. I am most likely to blindly register on a site if they are using vBulletin.

 

Most my members are used to vBulletin before, so using vBulletin was a must.

 

When I see a phpbb forum, the first thing I ask is - "do I HAVE to register here"? The answer is usually no and I leave.

I'll register on vbulletin first, then smf, ipb, mybb,,, and a few others. But when it comes to phpbb, 99.9% of the time - absolutely not.

 

I'm very surprised at the responses to be honest, and I originally thought this kind of powerful preference for a forum using certain software was rarer than it apparently is (I can say off the bat I get where people are coming from here, I personally prefer to join forums powered by vBulletin compared to any others). On another note, I guess the flipside is that if you use any type of software, off the shelf or custom, you'll get members who prefer that software in almost exchange for the potential members that don't like the software.

 

I pretty much don't think it affects much, only people[other admins] who are in the know of forum software would care since they know the ups and down of each oftware, other than that, new users will explore and not really know what a forum software is unless they got really interested by the design and/or look of the software.

 

I can say with 100% certainty that the software a forum runs can put members off joining.

Over time I come across forums that I would never join because of the awful software they are running, and I know the same applies to other people from talking to them.

 

That's a good point Paul, generally awful forum software can be off putting, especially if it's got no features, a bad design, or is generally difficult to use (aka bad usability).

 

The only times I have ever joined anything other than vb was when I really had to view the content which was within private forums and also for support with some software.

 

I'm not elitist enough to think I'd use a forum only if it were using one specific piece of software. Having said that there are a few that I'd rather not use that I've come across before. But usually if the info or discussion is good I'm game for most anything. And of course the popular crowd (IPB, vB, MyBB, SMF, phpBB) are fine by me.

But like someone else mentioned, most of us who are even semi-experienced in administrating a forum have our likes and dislikes. But does it really matter to the average end user? Maybe a little, but not near as much.

 

I believe that if a website is set up using free hosting and free phpbb etc forums, and then you have someone set up on paid hosting and paid forums you would get more registering on the paid setup!

 

Yes, mine was paid hosting. But since it was my first rodeo I didn't know how to install stuff yet. But when I switched to IPB about 6 months later I did the IPB install and conversion all myself. By then I think I'd also learned to install MovableType too. And if you can install MovableType based on Perl, then a php forum script is simple.

But I think I'm 99% against joining a forum that is at a free host on a sub or sub-sub domain.

 

I don't think the average forum member is going to be knowledgable enough about the various forum software packages to know any better. For myself, I can't stand forums on free hosts, though I don't mind joining phpBB-based forums.

 

I've been threatened with mass revolt, and being hunted down like a dog, drawn, disemboweled and quartered if I ever switched to vBulletin.

So yeah.

Some people have strong preferences.

 

Its not "elitist" - its knowing that the forum will be up and running tomorrow, and the next day.

I have seen lots of phpbb forums destroyed by hackers. There is no reason to get involved with a community that could be here today, and hacked tomorrow, and the next day, and next week and next month.

In comparison, I have seen very few vbulletin, IPB and SMF forums that have been hacked. It happens, but less then phpbb.

 

Merely strong preferences? That seems a tad more extreme from what you've described. But it's perfect evidence that the forum software you use does affect your members.

So your reasoning is that you'd prefer to join a forum running software that's less likely to be hacked? That seems a fairly good reason, especially as no one knows what a hacker could do with any personal information you supply to a site that gets destroyed.

 

What was it your members didn't like about vBulletin, Vekseid?

 

Some people have a real beef with the way it's organized. Not a lot, to be sure, and most haven't physically threatened me, but a lot of my members have stated that they cannot understand or navigate vBulletin forums (the control panel, the way it handles posts and threads, etc) very well, compared to SMF.

Your choice of forum software is not going to win you everyone. It can lose you everyone, but not win.