Well, it's a tricky one. I'm a web developer for a company. We have a client that we run a site, bbs and online shop for. The bbs is Ultimate Bulletin Board which is one of the most popular boards about. It's very well written and the support is second to none.
There are some pretty good maintenance tools on that one and they always turn off the forum when they're running. UBB is a perl based forum.
The thing is, when you want a forum for a specific purpose, it sometimes makes sense to write it yourself so that it can do specific things, rather than being a generic board.
In this instance, they haven't really taken advantage of it. It seems Fullerene supply similar tools to many clients, so they probably just used a standard model they had anyway. About the only custom thing I've seen is Vanessa can post and uses a blue unicorn .. big wow!
I run a website for a group of people and wrote a bulletin board for them in asp. This ties in nicely with the website which also runs on asp and means that I have been able to incorporate a lot of functionality and tools specific to them which is cool.
Anyway. I agree with you. They have a fairly generic board anyway, so maybe they should just have gone with somehting simple like UBB or phpBB etc. I guess they just didn't want anything too commercial or generic.
If they fancy adding any clever bits later on, then they still can and you don't get that with the standard forums you can download and install.
I think there is a big problem with the hosting of the site. The system that hosts it is fairly low spec, I think. It's so slow at serving up pages. There's also their internet connection that may be at fault, and then the coding for the forum.
Argh, my fingers hurt now!
-- Matt
