First of all, I know it's probaby a Coke/Pepsi or Chocolate/Vanilla sort of decision. Not really a BEST software to be used for everyone.

I've been with IPB for a couple of years. Liked it a lot. Chose it because I was tired of phpBB and didn't want to pay for vB (IPB was free at the time.)

But I've been looking over the fence for a while at vB. Almost pulled the trigger a couple of times. But never did. I know that if I did switch I'd have to have a new skin made for my forums. But the same thing would have to be done next time I update my version of IPB anyhow. So the $$ isn't really the big deal.

But for people who moved from IPB to vB (or just for people with actual experience running both) what would any advantages would you see come from switch.
**What issues did you face in the switch?
**Did you members take it easily or with some grumbling? Any details there?
**Any times you wished you'd not done it?

I know that vB has a better "portal" of sorts it seems for the front page of sites. They have Blind Polling which I've wanted for a few years on IPB. But I hear that some people think IPB is easier to admin and skin.

Also, anyone who switched from vB to IPB? Or people who use IPB and thought about vB but decided against it?

We've actually done that here at AF. The reasoning behind that is simply that more people use vB and favor it...because all of our visitors are avid forum owners, we felt that it would only make sense to use the most popular software.

Considering everything that is involved, the transfer was relatively easy. The biggest drawback by far is the password issue. If you don't know already, IPB and vB passwords are stored/encrypted in a different manner and IPB passwords cannot be converted to vB. Because of this, all members will be forced to reset their passwords after the transfer - obviously a problem...what we did was send out a mass email with a link to the reset password form.

Also, I ran into quite a few formatting problems (in posts and signatures)...the html just did not convert correctly, so there was a lot of script running and manual touches, which is going to be considerably worse for you considering the amount of members and posts you have.

All in all, now that all has been said and done, I am glad that we moved. IPB and vB are essentially equal as far as features go...yes, IPB has a better and easier admin side, but vB, imo, has a better user-side (which is the more important, am I correct? vB also has a larger support/mod community which is nice.

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I have also moved from IPB to vBulletin. Although my move was a little less frustrating because I was using a very old IPB version.

It was rather easy to convert and there were no password issues. We changed because of some security issues happening.

Plus the fact that I really liked the vBulletin interface and idea

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Well I thought it was cool

Ryan- What exactly is more difficult (not as easy?) about the admin side of vB compared to IPB? And what exactly is easier or more appealing about vB to the end user?

You saw the HTML didn't convert. Do you mean the text formatting (bold, italics, IMG, etc)? Was the "fix" an easy one? And the password issue makes me cringe. Not sure if I'd want to have to deal with all of that.

If the community you switched had not been one aimed at community admins/mods, would you have stayed w/ IPB?

illusion - Can you speak to the security issues you were experiencing?

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The admin side is much harder to navigate (find stuff)...For users, it seems as if vB users typically have more options available to them. The UCP is easier to work with and the top navigation (members, search, quick links, etc.) is also easier to work with. IPB has that stupid My Assistant that nobody uses.

No. They have a "cleaner" script which you have to manually set up and run after the conversion that will clean up a lot of it, but it's not easy to work with and it's not a 100% solution...I could have been a special case, I dont know...maybe it's not usually that hard, but it was for me....and for you with many many posts and signatures, it's just going to be that much worse.

It's hard to say. I think I would have to be there to determine that...

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Well one was that I was scared of people getting into it, and the other thing we were having was some code exploits that could happen, we had one person manage to hack it before it even came alive, because I bought the domain name from sitepoint. But I managed to fix that

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