vbDrupal
I support a small, semiprivate phpBB forum that has recently been under attack from user-list spammers, who register bogus users in the hope that search engines will spider user lists and raise the rankings of the Web stes cited in their bogus user profiles, which are almost invariably for porn and pills. I've turned on everything I can to discourage this, but phpBB moronically does not alow you to simply hide unvalidated users, so the craziness continues. And fairly recently, my hosting service disabled PHP exec(), rendering my two instances of the Gallery Web photo album unchangeable and thus useless. (Gallery uses exec() to call an external image processing package.)
So I've been sniffing around for alternatives, even if it means leaving my current hosting service for less paranoid pastures. The software doesn't have to be free, though it should not have delusions of "enterprise" pricing, heh. (I've always been willing to pay for software if it does what I want and isn't needlessly paranoid.) This may be an opportunity to (finally!) mount hardsf.com and use it for online SF workshopping, as I've wanted to do for years. What I'm looking for feature-wise is this:
- An online threaded message board with effective comment and user list spammer control.
- An online photo album.
- Collaborative document editing.
- A download area for documents and other files.
- Static but fully formattable mini-Web pages allowing users to post bios and promote their work.
- Built-in group chat for workshops.
- The ability to make selected forums completely private and invisible to non-members.
The group chat can be done otherwise if necessary, but the rest is pretty core to the mission. I'm looking at a lot of different packages, but one that intrigues me is vbDrupal, a melding of the commercial forum package vBulletin (which I have visited and like a lot) and the open source Drupal content management system. My question for this morning is: Has anybody here used either Drupal or vbDrupal, and if so, what do you think? Any other suggestions?