Looking to upgrade from phpBB..maybe?

Photography forum going membership

[fineart]

My question is this. We have a site and we are considering upgrading. We want certain features to make our transition from a free forum to a value added paid membership. Should we get another forum and replace phpBB.

We hope to have cooler, faster, leaner mods such as chat, image galleries, member of the month, auto notice when membership is coming up for renewal, video tutorial downloads etcetcetc

Should we switch to say www.boardmod.org....(www.yabbforum.comz) or to www.invisionboard.com or to ubbTHREADS or to Vbulletin
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Would like to find someone to help us with the techie side. Where could we find them? Elance? Here?
thanks!
Rob

[edited by: rogerd at 3:28 pm (utc) on April 19, 2005]
[edit reason] No links/URLs, please... [/edit]

[wheel]

I recently switched from phpBB to vbulletin because our mildly modded phpbb couldn't keep up with traffic, and vbulletin out of the box handled it no sweat.

It's pretty common to outgrow phpBB. It's great free software but at some point you're going to want to switch.

I don't know specifically about the mods you're looking for, but our decision came down to ipb vs vbulletin and vbulletin won by a bit.

As a positive, it's still within spitting distance of being free - and the support forums are fabulous. They'll actually answer your questions directly - and promptly.

We've never looked back.

[fineart]

THANKS! the biggest mods would be the ability to integrate photos within posts easily since we are a forum for photogs. Having a cool selection of mods would be great. Can mods be custom created if we hired somoeone? Does anyone know that?
Is UBB Classic a good choice?
ROB

[edited by: rogerd at 1:34 pm (utc) on April 19, 2005]
[edit reason] broken link [/edit]

[rogerd]

One doesn't hear much about UBB these days, although at WebmasterWorld we know that a Perl/non-DB forum can handle quite a bit of traffic if it's done right. I've used different Perl-based forum software with good success, too.

vBulletin does make it easy to attach files like photos to individual posts - this functionality is built into the software. You can also restrict access to these attachments if you want, e.g., you can require visitors to register before viewing them, or even restrict viewing to specific usergroups.