Poll: Discourse vs vBulletin

This has nothing to see with nothing that is talked in this forum, but i’m bored :smiley: so let’s see what is better, Discourse (the forum engine that uses MessengerGeek) or the famous and classical-modern vBulletin!

Let’s start the PVED (Poll Voting Engine of Discourse)

  • vBulletin
  • Discourse
  • I don’t want to answer or i don’t know

0 voters

I like vBulletin because has personalizated signatures, a better look like a giant page, a better categorization system, add Admins and Moderators, etc. But i like Discourse for another few things, well, you can left your opinion here!

If anyone wants to contact me, do it via MSN Messenger: urdanetaa19@gmail.com

Exist the “Uncategorized” category.

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I personally prefer the traditional forum style of vBulletin. Discourse feels way too much like a chat window for my taste, and recently I keep sending messages accidentally with a keyboard shortcut. There’s more emphasis on organization and you more rarely see someone posting in the wrong subforum/board/category.

and now watch as my opinion changes mid-post!

On the flip side: The main page of Discourse displays a ton of messages from all the categories, so it’s better for single-topic types of forums. (Like subreddits.) Having not enough categories isn’t as much a problem, since already the front page never feels empty. Topics have more visibility. I’ve seen some traditional forums that have boards that haven’t been posted in for a month. That issue isn’t as noticeable in Discourse.

Writing this made me go 50/50 on the thing. If your forum covers a wide array of topics or 1 general topic (like something as vague as “programming” or “gaming”) then a traditional forum like vBulletin could be a better choice. If the topic’s a little more specific, Discourse makes it feel less empty, especially for relatively small forums like this one.

Depends on the type of forum, and in my opinion, Discourse is much simpler, while vBulletin is better for much larger forums, such as the XDA forums that actually runs on a heavily modified version of that software.

(By “heavily modified”, I mean that the vBulletin branding had been removed, except on error pages, and that site I mentioned also has some of their own custom plugins installed)

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