I'd love to hear what led you to a UBB.x hosted solution. War stories welcome.

Please take the poll, then grab one from the cooler and share your site's saga!

So, what led you to select Infopop and UBB.x as your message board solution?

Hey Tom, did anyone ever tell you that you look a little like Johnny Carson?

I got a free offer!

Tom:

I voted for "I outgrew my previous host(s)". I don't know if that truly applies to my situation but it is the closest.

My "War Story"...

I previously used UBB.Classic on a secondary ISP since the ISP I use does not allow scripts (unless you pay a bundle). They do, however, host our shopping cart system at a very reasonable price so I did't want to loose that.

Our UBB.Classic board all of a sudden stopped running on the secondary ISP. Not a problem if it was going to be a short lived thing but I started to notice that several other UBB.Classic administrators in the ISP's own bulletin board were complaining of the same thing. And the ISP was not doing anything to get things going again. They kept claiming that it had nothing to do on their end but it seemed very fishy to me that all of a sudden, many people running UBB.Classic were in the same boat as me after successfully running "Classic" for months and months. So I made the jump.

I liked that the UBB.X board was set up for you and updated for you. I am pretty good with this type of stuff but it's always nice to have someone do it for you too. I also thought it was great that UBB.X could import users and messages from Classic. I liked the feature set in "X". It seems like a step up for me from the version of UBB.Classic I was using.

I really like UBB.X. My users do as well. There are a few small things that I think could be improved but overall, I am very pleased with the board, Infopop's service, and other aspects of the "X".

Harris

http://nonsportupdate.infopop.cc/6/ubb.x

...he's a real "card".

Great story, sir. The "able to sleep" at night factor is a good reason to have your board hosted at Infopop. NOT having to deal with issues resulting from an ISP making changes to your site that inadvertently trash your board takes a lot of the hassle (and worry) off of board admins backs, no doubt.

It's a heck of a lot more fun to spend your time building the traffic to your site than it is to spend it arguing with some guy on a tech support line (who is playing Quake while talking to you).

How many folks think that a message board is the real heart of their site? I know ours seems to be.

Tom

Phog.net: Where the Jayhawks Hold Court!

quote:

---

Originally posted by KimberlyQ:
Hey Tom, did anyone ever tell you that you look a little like Johnny Carson?

---

Um, why yes. You know, the bank teller never seems to get confused when I make a deposit, though.

Tom

Phog.net: Where the Jayhawks Hold Court!

I've been a long-time admirer of OpenTopic™. In fact, if you search you can probably find half a dozen topics in which I beg for an OT price reduction.

Once I got the heads up from Craig L. (is he still w/ Infopop?) I jumped on OT's little brother rather quickly. That's how I got my title.

I've never regretted my decision either. My old host was great, but support was very impersonal. You didn't know the other person, it wasn't a community like this.

Well, I actually am addicted to Bulletin Boards/Forums...my sis got me into it. At any rate, I own a license to another software, and ran into problems with it using too many recources. I have kept an eye over here at Infopop for a while...but cgi is not my thing and ubb.threads is not really right for me either.

I toyed a little bit with the ubb.x membership, and when I saw how friendly it was for members, I jumped on over.
I opted to take a subdomain so that the forums could remain seperate...I think that will work just fine.

Can't wait to get started here!

I'm here because of some guy from Plano, Texas thatlooks like Johnny Carson told me it was great

Right now I'm just trying to figure out how to configure everything to my old settings.

Do my graphics have to be the same number of pixels as the default UBB.x graphics?

BTW: The customers love it!

Welcome to the family! Was the move painful, and what did you sign up for at Infopop?

Tom

Phog.net: Where the Jayhawks Hold Court!

It was basically an easy process, started last Tuesday the 3rd and finished late in the afternoon. It was wonderful to do a server to server transfer of all my UBB classic stuff but I was diappointed that my settings were lost in the process. Fortunately I deleted thousands and thousands of old posts before I made the transfer. For some strange reason I still have posts from 1999 but no big deal.

I kind of feel uncomfortable because I don't believe I have FTP access to the membership database, etc but so far the Interface has been working well.

Spent several days working on my style settings and still at it but so far its looking "fair." I liked the clean look of the Title "frame" links here on UBB and on your site. SO, I adopted your basic code for StriperSurf.

Have a thousand questions but I'll search around for the answers. I think the Admin Guide is too basic.

Regards,

Bob D'Amico
StriperSurf.com

Does you new logo need to be the same height and width as the default? No. UBB.x will read the height and width of the new image and automagically set the height and width in the html for you.

Is Craig still here? No, he accepted an offer to a position that is quite an advancement in his career, and more along the lines of where he wanted to be headed. He's a superstar, he'll do well, I just know it.

"I kind of feel uncomfortable because I don't believe I have FTP access to the membership database"

Sorta. No, you do not have FTP access because it is not kept in individual data files as your UBB.classic was, it is in your MySQL database now. You Do have access to that. Log into your Ensim panel. In the center you'll see "services". CLick "Configure MySQL Database / phpMyAdmin". Log in and you'll see the users table near the bottom.

Can I join in with "why am I here?"

Simple. Somebody helped me when I had trouble installing my first UBB. I don't even remember who and the thread is long since gone . I just wanted to return the favor. Been hanging around since March 99. Ted and Rosemary hired me on along the way and now I get to help even more.

Honor The Victims

Face it this place is addicting


UBBDesign.com Custom Web Design Services.
How to install the JCTemplates

Loved how easy X was to implement and that I had direct control over most things. On my site, the board is the heart and soul. It's the entire site, although I may be adding more soon. Everyone who has come to the site has commented how professional it looks. Of course I claim all the credit.

Seriously, it's a great product at an excellent price point. And where else can you talk directly with the developers, product managers, and even the CEO of the company about their product?

In my day job, I work for Windows & .NET Magazine where we have about 1.5 million visitors per month. UBB.x stacks up as well or perhaps even better in some respects that our forums package any day in terms of great community building tools.

Keep up the good work ... but watch those upgrades.

--Eric Shanfelt (<A HREF="http://www.inthepattern.com/6/ubb.x?a=mprf&s=169608331&ignore=&u=669608331">read my bio</A> )

I'll kick in my $.02 here...

Why are we here? Well, the fact that UBB.x is free did have a lot to do with it; but it was as much because we outgrew our previous host as anything... well, I don't know if "outgrew" is really the right word. Let me share my "testimony"

I met my current girlfriend via the Internet about a year and a half ago. At the time, she had just recently started a message board on another free message board site. Since I've had a background in computers/Internet/etc. I was brought on as an assistant admin. At first it was pretty decent. However as time progressed, the problems begin to crop up. Weird little errors here and there, nothing too big...However, in the end, we were having errors all the time, the site was down as much as it was up, because the host was doing who knows what. We'd been told that since it was a free service, that there'd be some advertising to cover the costs. We were ok with an ad here and there, however when EVERY TIME YOU CLICK A LINK, you would get three or four new pop-ups, it just got to be too much. We were losing users like crazy, we weren't able to get anyone from the hosting agency to give us any kind of support. We'd go into their "support forum" and ask a question, and their "answer" was a nameless/faceless/otherwise responseless link to some other thread, which linked to yet another thread, which usually just said "we're aware of this, and we're working on it." One of our users had also had his site on the same host, and had somehow heard about, and moved over to Infopop and UBB.x and he was very happy with it. We were familiar with UBB, as other sites we'd used ran UBB.classic and UBB.Threads, so we knew it was a good system. We let him "check things out" for a month or two, to see how things were on this side of the fence. After nothing but rave reviews, we too made the move. I can honestly say we have never regretted it. The system is very user friendly, and easy to use. Sure, there is a bit of a learning curve, as with any change to something new, but the folks at InfoPop have been absolutely first rate in their help and support. Anything we need help with, we ask, and they respond. Problem solved. We've been with Infopop for about 3 months now, and we could not be happier.

http://tormentedvhfans.com