Lefora?

[brandys]

Has anyone here used Lefora forums? I've been looking at going with them vs. the standard VB or phpbb. The only thing I see though is it looks more like a forum community rather that a forum you can integrate into your own site.

[gazzie]

Never even heard of Lefora until now. I Googled it up and it looks like a hosted solution, which means that I automatically don't like it. You're right, it looks more like a community than a straight-up forum. It's nothing new, either, since you can do practically the same thing with existing scripts. Actually, it looks very much like an integrated Wordpress/BBpress site. :P

[Shane Phillips]

Originally Posted by brandys

Has anyone here used Lefora forums? I've been looking at going with them vs. the standard VB or phpbb. The only thing I see though is it looks more like a forum community rather that a forum you can integrate into your own site.

Don't look for more options, if you have VB in mind...

Regards,

Shane Phillips

[bossbob]

I totally agree with Shane. Vbullentin is the best forum you can use. Of course it isn't free. But I think it's reasonably priced. It's easy to use and understand.

[Sean]

Yes vBulletin is the best product. It is more secure than other forums.

[vlauria]

Hi, I'm one of the guys behind Lefora forums (we're a small team in san francisco).

gazzie, i'm curious to learn more why you don't like hosted solutions? We're working hard to make forum software that we think is kickass, and if people don't like our feature set, it's really helpful for us to know why (so that we can build more items).

Do you feel limited using a hosted service? We give away lots of free space and bandwidth and allow the admins to fully edit their CSS and add 3rd party widgets to the site. We also support custom domain name hosting, so you can have forum.yourwebsite.com and not have to use a Lefora domain. Are there other items you would be concerned with that we could address?

brandys, if you have any questions about Lefora, I'd be happy to answer them here, or you can email me at 'vincent -at- lefora.com'.

vBulletin is a great product, but I also think Lefora is a great product and we're working hard to listen to user feedback. We have a number of features you might not find on vbulletin, like spam prevention without captcha, automatic upgrades, an easy to use posting box for multimedia like youtube videos, rich member profiles, really great SEO out of the box for your forum, and a simple to use admin panel.

If anybody wants to set up a test forum and list their feedback, I'd love to hear it. Another thing you get with lefora, that you don't find on other forum platforms, is the ability to talk directly to the development team and help shape the product and decide what features we'll work on next.

Thanks,
Vincent Lauria, lefora co-founder

[Shane Phillips]

Vincent,

Thanks for your information on Lefora

We sincerely appreciate your contribution here and you should receive a feedback from all the users in our forum.

Regards,

Shane Phillips

[gazzie]

Originally Posted by vlauria

gazzie, i'm curious to learn more why you don't like hosted solutions? We're working hard to make forum software that we think is kickass, and if people don't like our feature set, it's really helpful for us to know why (so that we can build more items).

Do you feel limited using a hosted service? We give away lots of free space and bandwidth and allow the admins to fully edit their CSS and add 3rd party widgets to the site. We also support custom domain name hosting, so you can have forum.yourwebsite.com and not have to use a Lefora domain. Are there other items you would be concerned with that we could address?

Hi, Vincent! How are things there in San Fran?

Regarding hosted solutions and my general dislike of them, it's mainly because of the limited control users are given. I've had a closer look at Lefora and it seems it does give you a greater that usual control when compared to other hosted solutions. It actually looks more like a social platform than a straight-up forum ala vBulletin, which I think is probably a wise choice since it makes community building a lot easier. For webmasters who like to get down and dirty with the code, a hosted solution probably isn't right for them. For the average user, though, it's fine.

By the way, one big I issue I have with most hosted solutions is advertising. Namely, that hosted solutions companies put their own ads in users' sites. I understand why it's like that, but I (like a lot of people) prefer to monetize my own sites. I think I read somewhere that you are planning a premium solution where users can remove ads... does that also include allowing people to put up their own ads, too?

[techgirl]

Hey Vincent, thanks for stopping by and updating us here on Bodhost with information on Lafora. It's always nice to learn new information on other platforms.

[brandys]

Thanks Vincent, I'm still checking out my options here. I'm still looking at Lafora as well. I will get back to you should I have more questions.

[vlauria]

Thanks everybody for you feedback.

To answer some questions.

We do support ad removal, it's a premium service that is currently $14.95 a month, with that you also get 5GB of storage, 50GB of monthly bandwidth, custom domain name hosting (so you don't see the lefora.com domain), personalized tech support, and daily offsite backups)

We also have other premium services, such as whitelabeling, where we remove any mention of lefora.com and links to our site from your forum (by default they're on the footer). We have single sign-on as well, so if you already have another website, your members won't have to login to your forum, they are automatically logged in with their existing credentials.

gazzie, I would still like to learn more about your concerns on limited control. This would be really valuable information to us, as we've heard the same concners before and we want to make sure that we give away all the controls needed for an admin. Are there services you've seen in the past that limit your control? What would be some items that you're concerned about not having in a hosted solution? Admins have full access to the CSS so they can make their forum look however ever they want, from sizes to colors to background and header images.

p.s., if anybody is interested in setting up a test forum to provide more feedback, i'd be happy to give you one of our premium services for free - custom domain hosting. This would allow you to use your own domain name instead of lefora.com on our forums - i assume that's one item important to everybody here. Just email me at 'vincent -at- lefora.com' and mention this thread.

Thanks again everybody for the feedback (and if you have any negative points, I'd be glad to hear those as we really want to make the best forum product we can)

[Joseph]

Thanks for providing more information about the product. I think you have chosen a great way to launch a product which is good for all the users and to take the feedback of users after providing them the product is a good idea to make sure that the product you will be launching will be accepted by users.

However, you should make sure that VB has already established itself in this Industry and is liked by most of the users (atleast I think so ). Hence, establishing yourself with this product in this industry when VB is present will definitely be difficult for you (but as you are working hard, I hope you'll succeed one day ).

When it comes to features and stability, VB is definitely better than most of the platforms and if you are developing something with the help of user feedbacks, you should make sure that you develop it with the kind of stability and features which VB offers (users will definitely expect more than that ).

Also, if you would like to promote this product, I would like to give you a suggestion (from the users point of view). I think you should launch a beta version of this product which will be free of cost (kind of a free trial which does not have any kind of advertisements or your website(s) name) for some time. Once you launch something like this, people will definitely try this out and if they find it useful, they can pay the fee for the product. If you choose this way, you will also get the idea of what people think about this product.

[vlauria]

Thanks Joseph, that is a good idea about allowing a free 'Pro' trial (which has no ads/links), that is something we might be able to offer. It's interesting to hear from you that trying a forum with the same feature set, with 0 ads, would make a difference in your opinion.

I understand it's a long slow road to establish ourselves in this market as there are many alternatives that do dominate the industry. We hope that by reaching out to forum admins and hearing what they would like in a product, we can get down that road a little faster. We have been using our blog to interview large forum owners, running different forum software, from VB, to phpBB, to Lefora. They all have offered very useful tips on running active forums, you can check it out at blog.lefora.com (and if anybody here is interested in being interviewed on our blog, please let me know - we love to feature different forums.)

[gazzie]

Vincent, does the pro version with the ad removal also allow users to insert their own ads instead? It's not so much that forum owners object to ads in general, I think, just that they prefer putting their own ads instead.

The single sign on thing is interesting. Is that an integration script that works for various or does Lefora use an API for that, which can then be modified to suit users' needs? Speaking of API, if you don't already have one, then you should consider developing one. Part of the success of services like Facebook and Twitter is because of a developer API that allows users to extend the core capabilities of the service.

Regarding the limited control thing for admins, I think I'll need to have a closer look at Lefora before I suggest anything. It's different from script to script, so I have to know what Lefora can do before I worry about what it can't do. I might take you up on that offer to test Lefora out, actually. It'll be interesting to see how far the boundaries of forum and community software can be pushed.

[vlauria]

Thanks Gazzie, the pro version quoted above does not allow admins to put their own ads on the forum, currently that's a custom package and we've been talking to a few really active forums to allow them to do that, it runs on the order of $30/month depending on how much storage and bandwidth the forum uses.

We do have an API, here's more info on the Single Sign-On API: support.lefora.com/2008/12/16/lefora-third-party-authentication-api-single-sign-/page1/

We also have an API of feeds of your forum, every topic and category has it's own RSS feed. There is also an RSS feed for the entire forum and for individual members.

Would love to hear you feedback when you have the time. And if you do want that free upgrade to use a custom domain name (instead of lefora), you can shoot me an email at 'vincent -at- lefora.com'