The Allspark

Thanks! I thought this site was likely using it. I'd still like to see if any external parties are using it and how it might be implemented there so hopefully someone else will post it in here. I hate buyer's remorse and I hate that it took almost 2 years to admit it to myself.

I bought the lifetime license for IPB so so many years ago. The forums were exactly what we needed and we used it up to 3.4.x something. But when I needed to continue with it support was removed, my lifetime license was terminated and I was stuck with a broken forum who's database may or may not even be corrupted. Out of frustration I looked into other options and bought Xenforo in 2021 All in all, I feel like I've made a mistake. There are so many features that our 3.x forums had from IPB that ran circles around the stuff I can do (and am limited to) in XF. A decades old forum could manage admin and user permissions, layouts, just little things I took for granted. Every time I couldn't do it I would sigh and say "Why can't this do what my 20 year old forums could do easily?" Today was another example. I was trying to find a way to allow the admin to upload unlimited attachments while the users were restricted to 20 per post. Asked on the forums and was just told "Cant do it, it's a global setting" One of the things I'm working on in the first place is to create a landing page with articles to replace Wordpress and just have one unified site. I hate wordpress ,it's bloated and we don't use 90% of the features and it's never been properly bridged to the forums in the first place. So, with hat in hand, I'm back here looking for options. What I need - a robust forum and a fully functioning landing page where we can post our "news" articles about new toy releases, interviews, and that sort of thing. Before I make another jump I'd like to see some of this stuff in action. I know there are demos and I intend to try them at some point - but I'd like to see live sites that use the Pages and the Forums features natively and have at least some level of traffic. I see quite a few forums pages out there if I look hard enough but I don't see any showcasing working landing news/pages Can someone point me to any of these? If this is something that I think would do what we need it to do, I'd end up needing to convert the XF data and import to Invision. But I guess I can worry about that if I make it that far. If you have any comments to add or questions I'd be happy to answer those as well. Upon reviewing this post I may have put this in the wrong forums and I apologize for that.