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CEO at Econsultancy
18 July 2006 11:10am
A question we oftern hear with regards to online forums / bulletin boards is whether to build your own, or to integrate an 'off the shelf' service?
Some of the most common 'off the shelf' online forums / bulletin boards include:
- vbulletin
- Phorum
- phpbb
- Invision Power Board
I guess there are 3 main factors to consider:
1. Cost
Not just the cost of buying any software or code (a lot of it is free anyway), but the ongoing costs of support, upgrades, custom coding etc.
2. Coding Skills
It's all very well going for a (free) open-source bulletin board, but do you have the coding skills available to modify and support it as necessary?
3. Integration (particularly user profile data)
How easy will it be to integrate the forum / bulletin board into whatever else you are doing / offering on your site? In particular, you really don't want users to have to regsiter twice, once for your site and once for your bulletin board. So how will you integrate this data?
It was for reasons 2 and 3 above, but particularly reason 3, that we decided to build this forum from scratch (using ASP but migrating to .NET).
In many ways we'd much rather NOT have built our own as it is quite complex and there are still many issues, bugs, usability problems, features missing and so on which we'd probably resolve by outsourcing.
The same challenge is true for all sorts of other site functionality (search, e-mail, commerce, content mangement etc.). Increasingly, to do all the great personalisation, alerting, Web 2.0 type stuff that people expect you really need unified customer data as the bedrock.
This is quite easy if you have a single customer database upon which you build your applications. It gets harder the more external apps and services you start to integrate. However, it's looking like open APIs and more standardised code bases are starting to make things a little easier...
Are you building your own or integrating external services? Why...?
Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com
Director at Solid State Group
18 July 2006 14:45pm
We have also built our own forums that we sell as part of our CMS product WebDeck. There were a number of reasons for this, some of which are the same as yours Ashley:
- Consistent technology platform. Our CMS product is built from the ground up in Java. We could have made use of any one of a number of Java based forum systems, some are open source and some are paid for. Even if we had made use of a third party product, they almost certainly would have made use of additional libraries and API's that were not in our current suite of products. This adds complexity when wanting to add additional functionality to the forums. Our developers would need to learn the different web and persistence frameworks that these forums make use of. This adds time and cost to projects. We dont like needlessly adding time or cost to projects!
- Consistent look and feel. Controlling the forum code ourselves means we can easily customise each site build to ensure that the forums integrate well into the existing site design.
- Simplicity. A lot of the current forum applications are locked in a functionality arms race. That leaves their systems bloated, complicated and hard to use for the simple task of allowing your users to talk to each other. Our clients like simple solutions.
- Security Upgrades. Each time a new security vulnerability is discovered in an existing forum suite (and believe me, people find LOTS of security holes in third party forums as many are so well established and consequently have such large user bases) we would need to upgrade every site we have developed to ensure the forums are secure. If we have customised the forum to integrate into the site and user database it would mean a disasterous tangle of version control and package updates.
Writing a simple forum is not hard, and should not cost you an arm and a leg. We have generally found that the cost spent upfront in rolling your own is quickly recovered based on the above points.
Ben Rometsch
Technical Director,
Solid State Group
Founder and Editor in Chief at Internet Retailing
18 July 2006 20:36pm
The big question of course is whether a bb is actually needed. If the nature of the conversational flow is topical then threaded email discussion (gasp!) doesn't do a bad job. A bit of effort to extract and summary key learnings into a knowledge base can give you the ad hoc, informal flow of email with a current, contributory KB.
Another consideration is whether the main contributions are in fact comments (eg 400 people saying "I agree" in a humourous way, with 40-line sig files and "funny" pictures of themselves...). If so then a 'publish and comment' model may be more appropriate (ahem - much as we're doing now).
On-site search makes a massive contribution to navigating forums: people want answers or topics of interest rather than the 'joy' of browsing dozens of topic.
There is similar functionality to your system Ashley available "free", but in order to be more than a personal publishing system you need (as you've identified) user and account management at the very least. Still (you'll be pleased to know) this is becoming a standard feature of the best-support open source publishing systems.
Whatever your choice, you'll only ever be happy with your choice 20% of the time: the rest is spent researching, choosing, implementing, finding gaps, seeing that the grass is greener elsewhere etc. Whatever system you choose the two points to remember are that
- every system of size needs dedicated, expert administration and development to get the most from it; and
- the technology is never the 'answer' nor your USP: what you say and do what matters
Interesting to note though what AlwaysOn have done with their own blogging system - establishing "Going On" as a sort of blog-group, MySpace for the Brand You generation...Last question: we're speaking here about things being 'on site' - is there a 'web2.0' approach here, where you own/manage the user database, but pull in tools and components from elsewhere?
Retired at Retired
21 July 2006 17:01pm
Re Item 3, we have integrated other functions with vbulletin by reading the vbulletin database and logging the user into vbulletin whenever they log in via our normal function. Any users added get added into vbulletin automatically.
It is not so tricky if you are using the same database (in this case MySQL). Always the risk of the thing breaking if you upgrade of course.
I wish I could report that the result was stable and robust. But as only one or two articles ever got posted we were always asking ourselves if it really worked! Whenever we tested it we were Ok and in the end we learned a lesson that e-consultancy knows very well; a successful forum needs a core of users who are willing to keep it alive. Just setting it up for the client and waiting for the flood of postings doesn't work.
Bob
Principal at London Business Advisor
24 July 2006 14:23pm
Well, whether you do build your own or integrate an 'off-the-shelf' solution, my advice is not to forget or underestimate the importance of having really good community management and moderation functionality. After all, most branded communities will want to check some or all of the user-generated content that is being published, and if the tools for finding new posts and dealing with trolls are poor (or in our experience sometimes, incredibly, non-existent), then the moderation process will be much more resource-hungry than it need be.
Ashley is correct to point out that the need for coding skills should be a key factor in the decision to choose seemingly 'free' community software. As for integration issues when going the 'off-the-shelf' route, some vendors have sorted out the single sign-on process better than others so don't think that you have to trade off integration capability against 'off-the-shelf'; you can sometimes have both! Generally speaking, we recommend clients don't go the bespoke route as it is costly, time-consuming and often poorly specified - you need to have some compelling reasons to re-invent the wheel!
Rob Marcus, Buyer's Advisor, Chat Moderators (.com)
eMarketing Consultant at eMarketingHut.com
18 August 2006 00:10am
My company has just allocated a budget for me to find an all-in-one Enterprise Level Community style solution (forums, blogs, feeds,etc). Any tips on what I should be looking for?
Has there been a study done on levels of retention achieved by implementing forums or blogs? Or similar documentation I can refer to for in order to create my recommendations?
Thanks,
Marco
CEO at Econsultancy
21 August 2006 09:39am
Hi Marco
Try also asking your question in the emint forum - eMint are "The Association of Online Community Professionals"
Regards
Ashley Friedlein
CEO
E-consultancy.com
Principal at London Business Advisor
22 August 2006 17:39pm
On 00:10:04 18 August 2006 MarcoBarra wrote: My company has just allocated a budget for me to find an all-in-one Enterprise Level Community style solution (forums, blogs, feeds,etc). Any tips on what I should be looking for? Has there been a study done on levels of retention achieved by implementing forums or blogs? Or similar documentation I can refer to for in order to create my recommendations?